: Why is cached page showing after clearing all browser data I have cleared all browsing data from Chrome as well as pressed Ctrl+F5, but a cached home page is still displayed. My test homepage

@Vandalay111

This has happened to me a couple of times:


make sure that you are looking at the correct server (not localhost or a test server)
Make sure you uploaded to the correct server/folder (not a test server)
make sure that server is not redirecting you via .htaccess
Make sure your computer not redirecting you with a hosts file.
Make sure that the page is not being cached by Varnish or other web caching system.


Point 1 and 2 have cost me hours. Point 5 has cost me days.

Its always good to have an visual signal on you page that tells you if you are looking at a live site vrs a test site. Also, if you are not maintaining your own server, be sure to talk to the guy that is to find out if they are running a caching program.

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@Yeniel560

There are few possible options why a resource may not refreshed on the browser, even when you know there is a new version on the server.

One was mentioned by @ExploWare , but there are more options.


If the cache-control on the server is set to the future, the resource on the browser or any other cache is not going to be renewed until it expires.
Same applies to expiry header.
There are no etags to validate request for validity
There is no last-modified to validate request for validity
If the resource you are asking for is dynamic content, it can't be cached by standard modes, but it may be cached by plugins or special applications, if those applications are not behaving well or renewing their cache, then the response is wrong.
On some CDNs or balanced servers the information may not be synchronized on time for the request, so it goes to a server that still has old information.


I'm sure there are more that are not coming to mi mind now.

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@Fox8124981

Maybe you (or your ISP) is using a caching proxy?
You could try loading your site from an external proxy, for example mybypassproxy.com/.
To make sure the website to be reloaded (by any proxy or browser) you can use a unique address. PHP users will know this method as its sometimes needed in other cases.

Add a ?uniquedata to your URL, for example: host/index.htm?time=20140318220630. That way, any proxy and/or browser will have no matching record of that page.
or, if there is already a ? in the url, add it with an &
(http://host/index.htm?data=alreadyhere&uniquetimestamp=20140318220630)

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@Becky754

It has been a while for me, but some web servers do not notice changes to HTML web pages and other resources right away depending upon a polling algorithm. As an example, Apache does this though I think the polling is rather short. It was as much as 5 minutes at one point. It may also be that some form of caching is enabled on the web server.

Also:

In Chrome, try ctrl+shift+del. This gets you to the clear browsing data dialog. From there, click Cached images and files. (I un-click the rest.) This should delete all cached files. I find myself having to do this sometimes, though fairly rare.

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