Have questions about paid ads, campaign optimisation, or platform features? Browse our knowledge base for step-by-step guides, FAQs, and expert insights to help you succeed.
How to Clear Your Website Cache
On This Page
A cache is a saved copy of your site, kept so that visitors get pages instantly instead of waiting for them to be built. When you change something and the site stubbornly shows the old version, you are almost always looking at a saved copy rather than at the real page. There are four places a copy can be hiding, and only two of them are yours to clear.
The one-minute version. Hold Shift and press the reload button, and if that does not do it, open the page in a private or incognito window. That settles it about eight times out of ten, because the copy was in your own browser and nobody else was ever seeing the old version.
The four layers, and who clears which
Worth reading once, because it tells you when to stop trying and email us instead.
| Where the copy is | Who clears it | How |
|---|---|---|
| Your own browser | You | Hard refresh, or a private window |
| WordPress (the Hummingbird plugin) | You | Clear Cache, inside your dashboard |
| The hosting server | We do | Email us |
| Cloudflare, the network in front of your site | We do | Email us |
The first two are quick and completely safe for you to do. The last two are ours, and there is no button for them inside WordPress, which is why “I cleared the cache and it still looks wrong” is a normal thing to report rather than a sign you did it incorrectly.
Step one: rule out your own browser
Do this before anything else, because it is the most likely culprit and it takes seconds.
- Hard refresh. Hold Shift and click the reload button. On a Mac you can also press Cmd+Shift+R, and on Windows Ctrl+F5.
- Try a private window. A private or incognito window starts with nothing saved, so if the page looks correct there, your change went live and only your normal browser is behind.
- Check on your phone, off wifi. A different device on mobile data is the closest thing you have to seeing your site as a stranger sees it.
If the page is correct in a private window or on your phone, you are done. Nothing is broken, and no visitor is seeing the old version.
Step two: clear the WordPress cache
Your site runs a plugin called Hummingbird, which handles caching and speed inside WordPress.
- Log in to your dashboard.
- In the dark bar across the top of the screen, hover over the Hummingbird item and choose Clear Cache. You can also go to Hummingbird in the left-hand menu and use the Clear Cache button on its dashboard.
- Wait a few seconds, then hard refresh the page you were looking at.
Clear Cache is safe. The rest of that plugin is not for you. Clearing the cache never deletes content, settings or images: all it does is throw away saved copies, which then get rebuilt automatically. What we do ask is that you leave the other Hummingbird screens alone, especially anything called Asset Optimization or Minification. Those change how your site’s code is delivered, and switching them on or off casually is one of the few reliable ways to break a working site’s layout.
Honest expectation setting: on most sites we manage, the heavy lifting is done by the server and by Cloudflare rather than by WordPress. Clearing the WordPress cache is worth doing and costs nothing, but it is often not the layer that was holding the old copy.
Step three: when it is ours to clear
If the page is still wrong in a private window on a device that has never seen it, the copy is sitting on the server or at Cloudflare. Email us and we will purge it, usually within minutes of reading it. There is nothing further for you to try, and nothing you did wrong.
The cases that catch people out
- You replaced an image but kept the same filename. This is the big one. Images are told to stay cached for up to a year, so a new picture uploaded over the top of an old one with an identical filename can keep showing the old picture for a very long time, for you and for everyone else. Upload it as a new file with a different name and swap it in instead. See naming files and writing alt text.
- The layout looks broken right after we push a design change. Usually your browser holding old styling. Hard refresh first, and tell us if it survives that.
- It looks right when you are logged in and wrong when you are not. That is the giveaway that a saved copy exists for visitors. Worth saying in those words when you report it, because it tells us exactly which layer to purge.
- Cart and checkout pages. These are deliberately never cached, so if something is wrong there it is a real problem rather than a stale copy. Tell us straight away.
- A PDF you replaced at the same web address. Same trap as images. Upload the new version as a new file. See uploading a PDF and linking to it.
- Nothing at all has changed anywhere, on any device. Then it may not be caching. Check that you actually pressed Update, and that you were editing the page you think you were. See finding the page or post you want to edit.
What we need if something fails
Three things, and we can usually fix it on the first reply: the web address of the page, what you changed and roughly when, and whether it looks wrong in a private window or on your phone as well. That last answer is the one that tells us whether the problem is on your screen or on the internet.
Related
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?
Let us know and we’ll do our best to help out!