As a Web Editor, you may occasionally notice that your updates don't appear immediately on your live website. This guide explains why this happens and what you can do about it.
Websites and hosting providers use a system called "caching" to make sites faster and to reduce the cost of serving web content. "Caching" is taking snapshots of a site's pages. When visitors come to the site, they can quickly be served the saved snapshots instead of servers recalculating page content every time. However, this caching mechanism can get in the way of having the latest content changes appear to visitors.
: Web browsers save certain parts of a website (like images) on your local computer so they don't have to be downloaded every time you visit.
: The Drupal website platform saves certain parts of the site to speed things up.
: The hosting provider's web servers keep snapshots of the site to deliver pages quickly.
: A global network of servers stores copies of the site closer to visitors around the world, making it load faster for everyone, even when they're far from the hosting servers.
Some areas of the site consistently experience more trouble with caching:
- Changes to the menu, especially the top navigation bar, take longer to appear.
- : Websites automatically calculate which events are in the past and which are in the future, but with caching, this information can be out of date. Additionally, sometimes imported content doesn't force a refresh of the caches.
- : Switching the published/unpublished status of a page isn't always immediately reflected accurately on the site when logged out.
Most of the caching layers are outside of your control. However, here are steps you can take:
. This varies by browser but is usually found in the browser's settings or history menu.
- On Chrome, this is under Chrome > Delete Browsing Data > Cached images and files.
- On Firefox: History > Clear Recent History > Temporary cached files and pages.
. In most cases, the caches will update automatically within the hour.
, to allow ample time for the changes to propagate through all caching layers and appear on your site.
. We are here to help, especially for time-sensitive content.
If your changes are urgent, or you're encountering broken links or unexpected behavior, reach out to support.
Otherwise, contact support if your changes are not reflected after 4 hours.
Your feedback is valuable! We want to ensure a fast and reliable experience for our visitors and editors. Please let us know if you notice consistent delays or other caching-related issues so that we can continue to improve the websites' caching process and performance.