Troubleshooting

My Website Is Showing an Old Version

You updated your site but visitors see the old one. Cause: caching at every layer. Here’s how to clear it properly.

You pressed save, refreshed, and the website is still wearing yesterday's face. Almost always, that's caching — copies of your site saved at various layers, served fast but slowly going stale. Here's how to clear it at each layer.

Layer 1 — your browser

  • Hard refresh: Ctrl+F5 (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+R (Mac).
  • Try an incognito/private window, then a different browser wholly.
  • Optionally clear your browsing cache in settings.

Layer 2 — your site's own cache

WordPress caching plugins (and some hosting-level caches) store whole pages. Clear the cache from the plugin's dashboard — usually a Clear/Purge cache button. After a redesign or content edit, purge all, not just the current page.

Layer 3 — server-side caches

If WebFulHost or a plugin maintains an object/page cache, purge it too. For WordPress, plugins like the popular cache add-ons cover this in the same purge. When in doubt, logging out (cached pages are often skipped for logged-in admins) lets you see the real current site.

Layer 4 — DNS records

After a nameserver change, the "old version" is often genuinely the old host's site while propagation finishes — copies of the old DNS can linger for hours to days, especially on networks that cached it long. Test from mobile data and various locations.

Confirm what's actually live

To see the uncached truth, append a dummy query: yourdomain.com/?v=123. If that shows your update but the clean URL doesn't, it's a cache layer, not your file.

Persistent staleness

If specific people still see old content, their ISP DNS or a local proxy may be caching — that resolves on its own. Contact support if a server-side cache needs an account-level flush.

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