Web Caches and Browser Caches Affect How Your Page is Displayed

Sometimes you may be aware that a web page you are viewing seems "out of date" - you guess there should be some updates on the page but you don't see them.  What's gone wrong?

The most common reason for this is that the page is in your web browser cache. The browser cache is a tool in all web browsers to help pages load more quickly. The first time you load a web page, it should be loaded straight from the web server. Then, the browser saves a copy of the page and all the images in a file on your machine. The next time you go to that page, your browser opens the page from your hard drive rather than the server.

The browser should check the server once per session. What this means is that the first time you view your web page during a session it will be saved on your computer. Unfortunately, this does not always happen - depending on the way your chosen web browser is set up.  The browser may be looking at pages stored in your cache from viewing sessions long ago.

How to Force Pages to Bypass the Web Cache

In order to force your browser to load a web page from the server rather than the cache, you should hold down the shift key while you click on the "Refresh" or "Reload" button. This tells the browser to ignore the cache and download the page from the server directly.

How to change your browser settings to stop it caching pages

Most browsers allow you to "turn off" page caching so that when you click on a link to a page the browser takes the page from the server and does not look in a cache to see if you have viewed the page previously.  Whilst this might slow down browsing on pages with a large number of images, turning off caching does help to reduce problems with "out of date" pages being displayed. 
Note:  turning off caching won't necessarily solve all the probles but it will help.

The information files below explain how to turn of caching for different browsers:

Internet Explorer         Google Chrome         Firefox