No software is bug free. If you make changes to your website and people are not seeing them, chances are you may be experiencing a problem with your Web Browser or Web Server's cache.

When Changes to Your Website Don't Take Effect Except in the CMS

Here are 5 steps to making sure you aren't looking for ghosts in your website:

  1. Log out of your website and back in again. Double check to make sure that you actually made the changes you thought you did.
  2. Clear your web browsers cache history and check your web page again. Try it with a different web browser, preferably one that you haven't recently used.
  3. Clear your website's CMS cache. This process varies from one CMS to another. If you are using WordPress, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and Quick Cache are popular plugins.
  4. Clear your webservers cache. Apache has a restart option on the command line. On Windows, IIS and Apache can be restarted from the services panel. In the case of IIS, you can actually flush the cache by just changing the date/time of the web.config file. This can also be done by opening the file in a text editor and re-saving it. Note that some text editors will require that you make a change, like adding and removing a space, in order to save. That being said, it's safer to just change the date/time stamp since a file could technically become corrupt while saving it but you'll need a tool to change the timestamp of the file.
  5. Check to see if your web browser might be going through a proxy server. Unless you have some control over the proxy server, there is little you can do about clearing it's cache. In the meantime, you can always disable the use of the proxy server right from within your browser.

Javascript Error in the page -- Ajax

There are some compatibility issues where loading some versions of Ajax can result in a Javascript error in IE7. Interestingly, IE8 in IE7 compatibiity does not not generate the Javascript error. An updated version of the Ajax library but be sure to fully test it as some functionality has been depreciated and removed over the years.

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