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Some sites (including ours) leverage browser caching in order to speed up delivery of the site’s assets to your browser. It is effective and goes unnoticed most times.
But there are times you need a fresh reload of a page, and a cached page just won’t do. Here’s how to fix it.
Real quickly, browser caching is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes the sites you visit regularly load much faster and gives you a better overall experience. But if you run your own website, you know the need to see the most updated version of a page or post you may have just edited.
Or, perhaps you are waiting for a certain news story, article update, new video, sale price on a product…there are all sorts of situations you may find yourself not wanting to load up a page that isn’t perfectly up to date.
The Non-Extension Method
There is a way, without plugins, to accomplish this. It isn’t great if you have the need to see a cache-free version of a page with any regularity. If you just need it every once and a while, this will do just fine.
Simply hit CTRL + SHIFT + Backspace and your Clear Browsing Data menu will appear. If you simply unselect everything apart from Cached images and files, select your timeframe from the drop down (I just select ‘the beginning of time’), and hit Clear Browsing Data, you will be good to go. Just return to your browser and hit refresh and you’ll see a non-cached version.
The Extension Method
For me, I refresh pages with stunning regularity. As a web developer, I’m constantly making tweaks and changes and I want to see them as I change them. Up until recently, a simple refresh worked most times. It seems that either my host or Chrome has become a bit more aggressive, so getting the latest changes to display has become impossible most times.
This caused me to search out an Extension for the solution, and I have one that works perfectly.
It is called Clear Cache. Nothing amazing in the title, but this one is simple and works as expected.
You can snag it here, and when you have it up and running, a right-click on the icon gives you a path to the settings. In those settings, you can have the page reload right after a cache clearing session and set a keyboard shortcut to fire it.
The keyboard shortcuts actually are set in your extensions menu, reached by going to your 3-dot menu > more tools > extensions. Scroll to the bottom and set a keyboard shortcut for Clear Cache. Mine is CTRL + R and takes the place of the standard shortcut.
Now, every refresh with that shortcut gives me any page, free of cached items.
The settings are very similar to what you can choose in the first method above, so you don’t have to worry with wiping everything out in your browsing history.
Hope this helps for some of you who’ve been looking for a solution to this very particular issue.
