Help:Bypass your cache

In order to reduce loading times and save bandwidth when you visit Fandom, your web browser is instructed to save the current view of the page. This is called your "cache". If you visit that page again, your browser will see if there is a newer version of a page available. If there is, the new version is downloaded. If not, it will quickly load much of the page straight from your cache.

Sometimes, however, you might continue to see the cached version of the page even when a newer one is available, for a variety of reasons. This can be frustrating if a change has recently been made to the page.

In order to ensure you're getting the latest version of the page, you can manually bypass your cache — a process which is sometimes also called a hard refresh — in which you effectively tell your browser to ignore its cache and fetch the entire page again from the server. This is sometimes confused with clearing your cache, but that's actually a different process with similar effects, and something we won't discuss here.

When to bypass your cache

Generally, you may need to bypass your cache if you have made changes to:

  • A CSS page (personal or community-level)
  • A JS page
  • The wiki favicon
  • The wiki theme

However, if you see anything "odd" or not changing, it's worth bypassing your cache to see if the problem resolves.

How to bypass your cache

For most browsers, bypassing the cache is simple. Below are some browser-specific ways to do so:

Note: After publishing, you may have to bypass your browser's cache to see the changes.

  • Firefox / Safari: Hold Shift while clicking Reload, or press either Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-R (⌘-R on a Mac)
  • Google Chrome: Press Ctrl-Shift-R (⌘-Shift-R on a Mac)
  • Edge: Hold Ctrl while clicking Refresh, or press Ctrl-F5.

For more information (including other browsers), see this page on Wikipedia.

Forcing the server to re-render a page

Bypassing your own cache might not be enough if the updated content is not being properly displayed or is contained in a template or other transcluded page. You may need to purge the server's cache of old versions of the page, by appending the URL with ?action=purge, in order for the new material to be visible.

See also

Further help and feedback