Tuesday, March 19, 2024

How to Disable Cache & Hard Refresh a Specific Site in Chrome

Updating your website and browser doesn't show the updates no matter how many times you refresh?

What is Browser Cache

Before we Hard Refresh, let’s first understand what is browser cache and why it is important. When you visit a website for the first time, the browser saves important assets like CSS files, JavaScript files and fonts locally in the browser cache.

When you visit the web page again, the browser retrieves these assets from this local cache. This reduces the number of requests sent to the server and prevents browser from downloading these assets again. Browser cache improves loading speed and reduces network load.

Website not loading properly

Sometimes a website does not load properly due to the following problem in cache,

  1. The browser cache is corrupted
  2. The browser uses older cache even though there is a newer version of the web page on the server

Sometimes, the website keeps loading forever and sometimes you might see broken CSS and improper layout.

Website is updated but cannot see changes, Ctrl+Shift+R is not working

The usual refresh keys like F5 or Ctrl+F5 won’t clear the local browser cache. And sometimes, the hard refresh shortcut Ctrl+Shift+R too doesn’t work. It becomes annoying especially when you are making changes to your website and the browser does not show the changes no matter how many times you refresh.

In these situations, you might want to clear, disable and bypass the local browser cache and get all assets fresh from the server.

Completely Disable browser Cache and Hard Refresh a specific website

Follow these steps to bypass cache and hard refresh a specific website.

1. Open Inspect Element (Developer Tools Console)

Right click and select “Inspect“, to open Google Chrome’s Developer Tools Console, alternatively you can also hit F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I

Google Chrome Inspect Element Developer Tools Console

2. Disable Cache in Network Tab

Click the “Disable Cache” check box in the “Network Tab

Disable Cache in Network Tab of Inspect Element in Google Chrome

3. Select “Empty Cache & Hard Reload”

Right click on the “Refresh icon” and select “Empty Cache and Hard Reload

Note that this special right click menu is available only when Inspect element is open.

Right Click and Select Empty Cache and Hard Reload

Done. Now you will get a fresh version of the site from the server bypassing the local cache.

Did you know? You can Remove Password from PDF documents using Google Chrome.

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

one × 1 =

[gs-fb-comments]

Recent