Why clearing or refreshing your cache is important?

Your browser has a folder in which certain items that have been downloaded are stored for future use. Graphic images (such as buttons and icons), photo's, and even entire web pages are examples of items which are saved or cached. When visiting a webpage your browser checks if a copy of the files on the page is in its cache already. If so, it will save the visitor some downloading and make webpages load faster. Some browsers refer to it's cache as Temporary Internet Files.

Cache refresh

There are some situations when bypassing your browser's cache is preferred. Just clicking the refresh button (or hitting F5) won't be sufficient in this case, because this reloads the webpage while still using the old files from the cache. You need to refresh your cache first! Refreshyourcache.com contains step by step guides to clear your browser's cache forcing it to download all latest data from a website!

Tell me more about cache

What is browser cache?

In order to speed up web browsing, web browsers are designed to download web pages and store them locally on your computer's hard drive in an area called "cache". Browser cache (also know as Internet cache) contains records of every item you have viewed or downloaded while Internet surfing. So when you visit the same page for a second time, the browser speeds up display time by loading the page locally from cache instead of downloading everything again.

Although storing Internet cache makes web browser faster as it usually takes your computer less time to display a web page when it can open page's elements or even the entire page from your local Temporary Internet Files folder, You sometimes want to overrule the Internet cache, for Example to see changes you made to a webpage you just uploaded. On Refreshyourcache.com you can find tutorials on how to refresh the cache from your browser.

Clearing Cache Memory

To ensure you see the latest version of a site you need to clear the cache memory. This is done by doing a force refresh by pressing both control and F5 buttons simultaneously on your keyboard (depending on your browser). Most times a simple force cache refresh won't work and you need to clear the cache by hand. On this site you can find step by step guides for Chrome, Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Safari and more on how to refresh your cache.

Force Refresh

Someone just told you to “force reload” your browser to fix something. Depending on your operating system all you need to do is the following key combination:

Windows: ctrl + F5
Mac/Apple: Apple + R or command + R
Linux: F5

Cache and Privacy

Internet cache can threat to your privacy as everyone who has access to your computer can see some personal information by simply opening the cache folder.
Also when the cache fills up, performance can slow down and your hard drive may run out of space.

Internet Service Provider Cache

In the same way that your web browser has a cache of recent web pages, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may be doing some caching on your behalf.

In some (rare) cases, even though you are using shift-refresh to get new data from a webpage, the pages still seem to be old. This may be because your Internet Service Provider also has a cache and their cache may not be set up quite right, and they are not downloading the latest web pages.

When you encounter this problem you will have to communicate with your ISP to fix this problem