Caching Made Simple - Why You Need To Clear Your Cache

Encountering issues on your website from time to time is normal. All you need to do is ask your developer to fix it. However, when you check, you still can't see what has been changed. Why?

If you can’t see it, you probably haven’t cleared your cache.

The process of caching is to temporarily store the content of a website you have visited previously. This speeds up the loading of the site when you try to access it later. If you don’t clear your cache after changes are made to your website, what your computer will display is the previous version of the website that has been stored or cached in your computer.

But there’s more than just one type of caching

There are actually three different layers of caching.

The first layer is browser caching. It’s what’s stored in your computer which we mentioned earlier. When you look at a website, files and content get stored in the hard drive of your computer which makes access to site data almost immediate.

CDN or Content Delivery Network caching is the next layer of website caching. It is something like cloudflare which is what we use and recommend. This type of caching stores a copy of your website, not in your computer, but in data centers in all the major cities in the world.

How does it work? When a user visits your website, it gets the stored files from the nearest data center where the cached version of the website is stored instead of getting it from the server. Which leads us to the next layer of caching—server cache.

Server caching puts all the little bits of files that make up your website together and creates a cached file of what your site would look like. Data is cached on the server itself. With server caching, only one request needs to be made from the server instead of a whole bunch of little bits of images and code.

So in order for you to see the changes done on your website, each of these three layers of caches must be cleared.