Each time you visit a website your web browser will cache some of the data (that is, it stores it), to allow for quicker loading in future so it doesn’t have to download the sames files all over again. Sometimes this can cause issues where you’re making changes to your website on the server, but your browser might not neccessarily instantly see that. So you may need to periodically clear your browsers cache to get a ‘fresh’ copy.

Below are some steps for clearing your browsers cache in the most common web browsers, if your browser of choice isn’t listed you can likely find the steps in it’s help material or through a quick Google search.

When following the steps below your browser may also offer options to clear stored passwords, etc, this isn’t needed for cache clears and may only cause you some grief, thus they’re best left unchecked.

Internet Explorer 8 and above

  1. From the Safety menu in the upper right, click Delete Browsing History.
  2. Deselect Preserve Favorites website data, and select Temporary Internet files and Cookies.
  3. Click Delete.

Internet Explorer 7

  1. From the Tools menu in the upper right, select Internet Options.
  2. Under “Browsing history”, click Delete.
  3. To delete your cache, click Delete files.
  4. To delete your cookies, click Delete cookies.
  5. Click Close, and then click OK to exit.

Firefox 3.5 (these steps are for Windows, it may vary in Mac and Linux releases)

  1. From the Tools menu, select Clear Recent History.
  2. From the Time range to clear: drop-down menu, select the desired range; to clear your entire cache, select Everything.
  3. Click the down arrow next to “Details” to choose what history elements to clear (e.g., check Cookies to clear cookies).
  4. Click Clear Now.

Chrome

  1. In the browser bar, enter: chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
  2. Select the items you want to clear (e.g. Empty the cache and Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data).
  3. You have the option to clear your cache for a certain time period, to clear your entire cache, select the beginning of time.
  4. Click Clear browsing data.

Safari

  1. From the Safari menu, select Empty Cache.