Chrome and Safari are showing old pages!

Question

I had some issues getting my new website to show up. When you went to my website it said it couldn’t find the server. It has since been fixed, but now my Chrome and Safari browsers are both saying they can’t find the server –  will this will clear up after a very short time I hope?  Is there something I’m doing wrong?

Answer

Your site is up. What you are seeing is what was stuck in the cache from when it was down. Your cache is your computer’s memory of places you have visited in your browser. It stores pages and images that you have viewed. The advantage is that it will pull up those pages the next time much quicker than the first time. However, sometimes your computer browser will hold on to the cache and show you something outdated – which is what you are experiencing now.

Anyone who wasn’t checking your website at the time of the problem will see the site as intended now – as they don’t have any old pages cached.

To fix it on your end, try refreshing a couple of times, or dumping the cache and restarting your browsers. Safari is especially bad about hanging onto the cache. If you want to use Chrome, you can open a new “Incognito” window in Chrome (File –> New Incognito Window) to display your page without it relying on something old that has been cached.

Safari Fix:

• From your Safari menu bar click Safari –> Preferences –> Advanced
• Select the “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
• Now from the menu bar click Develop –>  Empty Caches
• Restart Safari

Eventually, most cache problems fix themselves even without forcing a purge.