Detecting your browser…
Hard refresh your browser
Someone updated a website and asked you to “clear your cache”? This shortcut forces your browser to fetch the newest version of the page.
Your browser
Notes for your setup
Quick check
Test my cache
Two quick checks: did this page reach you over the network or from your browser’s saved cache, and does your device’s clock agree with the server’s? An old cached copy is how you end up looking at yesterday’s website.
Still seeing the old version?
Guided troubleshooting
Work through these steps in order. Each one rules out a different caching layer. Tick the ones you’ve tried — the summary at the bottom builds itself, ready to send to whoever runs the website.
Use the shortcut shown at the top of this page — it tells your browser to ignore its saved copy and download the page again. Do it on the website that looks out of date, not on this page.
Private (incognito) windows start with an empty cache. If the site looks correct there, the problem is your normal window’s cache — clearing browsing data for that site will fix it.
- Chrome / Edge / Brave:
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + N - Firefox:
Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + P - Safari: File → New Private Window
Open the same address in a browser you rarely use. If it shows the new version, the stale copy lives only in your main browser. If it’s old everywhere, the problem is beyond your device.
Check the site on your phone — ideally on mobile data rather than your Wi-Fi. If it’s current there, your computer or network is holding the old copy. If it’s old there too, the site’s own caching layers are involved.
Many sites sit behind a content delivery network — services like Cloudflare, Fastly, Bunny, or AWS CloudFront — that keeps copies of the site on servers around the world. Those copies can stay stale for minutes or hours after an update.
This isn’t something you can clear from your side. The site owner needs to “purge” the CDN cache from their dashboard.
Some websites install local applications called service workers that can continue serving older files even after a browser refresh. Clearing the site’s data removes them.
- Chrome / Edge / Brave: click the padlock or tune icon in the address bar → Site settings → Delete data
- Firefox: padlock icon → Clear cookies and site data
- Safari: Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data → remove the site
If you’ve reached this step, the stale content almost certainly lives on the website’s side — CDN, server cache, or a deployment that didn’t complete. Copy the summary below and send it to your web developer or the site owner; it tells them exactly what you’ve already ruled out.
Diagnostic summary
Updates live as you tick steps above. Copy it and paste it into an email or support message.
Understanding the problem
Why doesn’t refresh work?
Between a website’s server and your screen, the page can be saved — “cached” — at five different layers. A hard refresh only clears the first one. Any layer below it can still hand you an old copy.
Advanced: how browsers decide what to cache
Servers attach HTTP headers to every response that tell the browser how long it may reuse a saved copy. Cache-Control: max-age=31536000 means “keep this for a year”; no-store means “never save it.” Validators like ETag and Last-Modified let the browser ask “has this changed?” and receive a tiny 304 Not Modified instead of the full file.
A normal refresh revalidates the main page but may reuse cached subresources. A hard refresh sends Cache-Control: no-cache with every request on the page, forcing full re-downloads.
Advanced: service worker lifecycles
A service worker sits between the page and the network. Until a new worker version activates — which by default only happens after every tab running the old one closes — it can keep answering requests from its own cache. This is why a site can look stale even across hard refreshes, and why “close all tabs for the site, then reopen” sometimes fixes it.
Advanced: DNS propagation
DNS records carry a TTL (time to live) that tells resolvers how long to remember an answer. After a site changes hosting, resolvers keep returning the old server address until the TTL expires — typically minutes to hours. Flushing your OS DNS cache (ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, sudo dscacheutil -flushcache on macOS) can shortcut the wait on your own machine.
Reference
Hard refresh shortcuts, every browser
Search by browser or operating system. The copy button puts a plain-language instruction on your clipboard, ready to send to a client.
| Browser | OS | Hard refresh | Copy |
|---|
For developers
Stop sending this link — cache properly
The long-term fix for “can you clear your cache?” is serving assets that never need it. Four techniques cover nearly every case.
Cache busting
Put a content hash in every asset filename so a changed file is a new URL. Old caches become irrelevant instead of stale. Query strings (?v=2) work but some proxies ignore them — fingerprinted filenames are safer.
app.3f9c1b.css ← cache forever app.css?v=2 ← weaker, but easy
HTTP cache headers
Hashed assets get a year of immutable caching; HTML gets none, so the browser always re-checks the page that references them.
# hashed assets Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, immutable # HTML documents Cache-Control: no-cache ETag: "a1b2c3"
Service workers
The browser checks for a new worker on navigation, but the old one controls pages until they all close. Call skipWaiting() and clients.claim() to activate updates immediately — and version your caches so old entries are deleted on activate.
self.addEventListener('install',
e => self.skipWaiting());
self.addEventListener('activate',
e => clients.claim());
CDN purging
After a deploy, purge changed paths rather than the whole zone — full purges cause an origin traffic spike.
Cloudflare Caching → Purge by URL Fastly Instant purge by key/URL Bunny Pull zone → Purge CloudFront Create invalidation /*
Common questions
FAQ
Will a hard refresh log me out or delete passwords?
No. A hard refresh only re-downloads the current page’s files. Cookies, logins, saved passwords, and bookmarks are untouched. Clearing site data (step 6 in troubleshooting) can log you out of that one site, but never deletes passwords.
Why can’t I hard refresh on my phone?
Mobile browsers don’t expose a hard refresh shortcut. The closest equivalents: close the tab fully and reopen the address, use a private tab, or clear the browser’s cache in your phone’s settings (e.g. Settings → Safari → Clear History and Website Data on iPhone).
The developer says they updated the site, but I still see the old version. Who’s right?
Probably both of you. The update is real, but a cache between their server and your screen is replaying an old copy. The troubleshooting steps above identify which layer — and whose side it’s on — in a couple of minutes.
How is a hard refresh different from clearing my cache?
A hard refresh bypasses the cache for one page, one time — quick and safe. Clearing the cache deletes saved files for every site, so everything loads slower for a while. Try the hard refresh first; clear the cache only if the problem persists.