Troubleshooting Cache Issues

In our last post, we talked about how caching works and why it’s an important part of the viewing experience on your site. But sometimes there are caching issues that seem to break the site. What causes these issues? What can we do to prevent these issues from occurring?
Another fantastic question. The answer is fairly simple.
First, we’ll talk about what happens when caching fails. It usually results in styling (CSS) conflicts or issues with the interactivity of your site (JavaScript). When your fonts or background colors suddenly stop displaying properly, or the mobile navigation menu won’t stay closed, but only for one (or a few) readers, this is very often a caching issue.
You’ve seen it yourself — you log into your WP admin dashboard and everything looks different! You contact support and they tell you to “clear your browser cache” and instruct you on how to do so. Everything looks right again!
What happened? In short, the information stored on your website didn’t match the information the cache told your browser to look for. This can happen with either type of caching — browser or server-side — and it’s a tough technical issue to solve.
There are so many pieces of the website that the browser and server cache, and any time an update is made to a plugin, theme, or WordPress itself, there’s a chance something in the update will be different than what’s stored in the cache. This is normal and, most of the time, developers are able to avoid this actual information/cached information collision by attaching extra bits of information to the CSS, JavaScript, and other files that tells your browser what changed.
Again, this is quite difficult and there are sometimes conflicts. This can cause panic because it might temporarily show an incorrect version of your site to your readers, which isn’t something we want.
There’s no way to prevent this entirely. Even if you have no caching plugins and all caching is disabled on your server (which you wouldn’t want to do because that’s not very efficient at all), your reader’s browsers will still store a cached version of your site. However, there are a several ways to help minimize the conflicts.
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