Caching is essentially data storage, to make things load faster. When you browse a website, your device will store a copy of that website, so if you visit it again, it can load your previous saved version instead of having to download it again. For recruitment websites, this can mean your job board is out of date.
Website caching is made even more complicated because it can happen in multiple places;
Caching on the web server
The server that displays the website will often employ caching. Websites more often than not are powered by a database, connecting to this database takes time and resource, so instead of connecting every time, it connects just once, stores the resulting data and delivers that instead.
Caching on a CDN
Some web hosts store your website across many web servers, usually in different locations. The server closest to the user is the one that will deliver the website. These severs themselves are cached, again for a faster response and less server usage.
Caching through a Plugin
There are lots of plugins available that will cache content to make your website run faster. These plugins create static versions of your pages to save the server having to communicate with the database.
Caching at your Internet Provider
Companies based in large office blocks are likely to be caught out by this one. Internet providers themselves cache websites to save their own bandwidth. Throughout the office, many users will likely look at the same pages, the local news website for example. To save the ISP having to download that site 100x, they download once at a set interval, and deliver that.
Caching on your own web browser
Lastly we have your own web browser. When you visit a website, the website is downloaded to your own device. The next time you view the website, your browser may give you the version it already downloaded instead of a fresh copy.
As you can see, there are many different methods of caching to speed up website delivery. In most cases, many of these caches are working together complicating this even more.
Your web browser could cache a cached version of an ISP provided website which is turn is caching a cached version made by a plugin which in turn cached a stored version by the server itself.
Caches are updated every xx minutes, hours, days, depending on the policy
This doesn’t mean that you will always be viewing an out of date website. Caches are automatically updated, some as often as every minute, some may be cached for weeks depending on the caching policy.
How to fix caching issues
Caching, despite sounding like a royal pain in the butt, is very useful, will speed up your website greatly which in turn helps your seo ranking.
But there are many instances where you do not want caching in play, your recruitment website job board for example. Your job board should show your latest jobs whilst removing your old jobs.
Here are some methods to help with caching;
Prevent web server caching
Caching can be turned off for the whole website, or even better, you can choose to cache only certain pages. Your About Us or Contact pages may not change in many years, these are ideal pages for caching.
Use your web server caching settings to turn caching on or off for certain pages only, meaning your often updated pages remain cache free.
Prevent CDN Caching
If your web host uses a CDN, it is likely that you have less control over this than your main server caching.
Your likely options are to empty (often called purging) the whole cache only. This can be useful if your website has an important update, making sure the CDN cache is running the very latest version of all of your pages.
Prevent Plugin Caching
Your have installed a caching plugin for a reason, so it is unlikely you will want to remove the plugin completely.
Most caching plugins feature options to include or exclude certain pages. Be sure to set an exclusion for your job board and job pages specifically.
Prevent Internet Provider Caching
Most often, if you contact your internet provider, they are happy to prevent certain websites or pages from their caching system.
Prevent Web Browser Caching
It is possible to add a piece of code to your page to request (the browser may not always honour this) the browser to not cache particular pages.
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0Your web developer should be able to set this for you. If this has not been set and your browser is not showing the latest version of a page, there are some tricks you can try. First, open a fresh incognito window, this shouldn’t contain any cache and load a fresh version of the page.
Alternatively, try tricking your browser into believing the page is new by adding a query to the end of the url, for example
https://www.domain.com/job-search/ change this to
https://www.domain.com/job-search/?cache=goaway
Sometimes having a different query to the end of a url will trick your web browser into download a fresh copy of the page.
If neither of these worked, web browsers usually update their cache every few days if no directive is set using the code provided above.
As you can see, caching is very useful but also can be a website owners biggest pain, especially for recruitment websites where you have content that changes frequently such as the job board. Use the tips above to beat the cache and deliver the most up to date version of your website.
Still struggling, contact us and we should be able to help bust that cache.