Why don’t I see the changes I just made to my website?

For example, you secure a huge sponsor two weeks out from your event and the company urgently wants their logo displayed on your event website.  Piece of cake, you think. It takes less than 5 minutes to sign into a2z’s Global Admin and and add the company name and logo to your event home page. You notify your sponsor, happy you were able to accommodate their request in a timely manner, and a few minutes later you receive an angry-gram stating the logo is not displaying on the home page. Baffled, you sign into the Global Admin and verify the change you made was done properly. As a last resort, you open the home page on the public site, only to find the same perplexing issue.

Don’t worry. The system is not broken and you are not going crazy. Before you pick up the phone and call your project manager in distress, there is an easy step you can take to clear your web browser’s cache, which is typically the root cause of the mysterious disappearing changes on your website.

Stop, think, troubleshoot.

Before you expend anymore valuable energy on the issue, try clearing your browser’s cache. Web browser caching, also referred to as temporary internet files, is a process that runs behind the scenes on your computer to load web pages more quickly the next time you visit them. In the case above, the sponsor and the exhibits manager  both accessed the online floor plan before the logo was added. Therefore, the floor plan was already cached on their computer. In other words, when they opened the floor plan to verify the sponsor company name and logo were displaying, the browser pulled all of the temporarily internet files from their computer to save time,  instead of loading all of the updated files directly from the website’s server. Browser caching prevented the viewers from seeing the name change. Have no fear. There is a simple solution to clear the cache, which every web user should know.

How do I clear my cache?

The steps to clear the cache are different across all Internet Browsers. You will need to identify which browser you are currently using and follow the appropriate steps below*:

Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9): Go to the ‘Tools’ menu Click ‘Internet Options.’ Under the ‘General’ tab, locate the ‘History’ section Click the Delete button

Mozilla Firefox 12.0 Go to the ‘Tools’ menu Click ‘Options’ Select the ‘Privacy’ icon In the ‘History’ section, select ‘clear your recent history’

Chrome 18.0 Go to the ‘Tools’ button Select the ‘Tools’ option Select ‘Clear browsing data’ Also, make sure the following options are selected: a. Clear browsing history b. Clear download historyc. Empty the cache d. Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data

Safari 5.1.5: Go to the ‘Safari Settings’ button Select ‘Preferences’ Select the ‘Privacy’ icon Click ‘Remove All Website Data’

Opera 11.62 Go to the ‘Tools’ menu Select ‘Delete Private Data’ Click ‘Detailed Options’ and make sure the following areselected: a. Delete entire cacheb. Clear history of visited pages c. Clear history of downloads Click ‘Delete’

*Note: the instructions above may not be accurate for certain versions of

Internet Browsers. When in doubt, Google it!

This post contributed by Kendra Smith, staff Project Manager at a2z, Inc.