Why your website updates don’t show up immediately (and why that’s usually a good thing)
You’ve just updated your homepage. You hit publish, refresh the page, and… nothing. The old version is still there. You check on your phone: old version. You ask someone else to look: they see the old version too.
Something’s broken, right? Actually, probably not. What you’re experiencing is caching in action, and while it’s frustrating in this moment, it’s making your website significantly faster for everyone who visits.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a service that sits between your website and your visitors, making your site faster and more secure. Instead of connecting directly to your web server, visitors connect through Cloudflare’s global network of servers. Understanding how its caching works helps explain why updates sometimes don’t appear immediately.
How edge caching works
When you use Cloudflare, your website gets distributed across a network of servers located around the world. When someone in New York visits your Vancouver-based website, they’re not reaching all the way across the continent to your web server. Instead, they’re getting a cached (stored) version of your site from a Cloudflare server that’s geographically close to them.
This is called edge caching because these servers sit at the “edge” of the network, close to your actual visitors. Your website’s content (images, CSS files, JavaScript, PDFs, etc) gets stored on these edge servers and served from nearby locations instead of your main server having to send them every single time someone requests them.
The speed benefit
The result? Your website loads in a fraction of the time. Instead of a 2-second wait, you’re looking at 200 milliseconds or less. This speed difference has real business impact. Research shows that a 100-millisecond delay in page load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%[1], and 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load[2]. Proper caching can be the difference between a visitor who engages with your content and one who leaves before your page finishes loading.
The catch? When you update something, those edge servers are still serving the old version they have stored. They don’t know you’ve made changes until you tell them.
Three places your site gets cached
Your website operates across three distinct places. Your origin server is where your actual files live and where you make updates. Edge cache lives on Cloudflare’s global network, storing copies to serve visitors quickly. Browser cache lives on each visitor’s device, where their browser saves files locally to speed up repeat visits.
Here’s the key to troubleshooting: if only you or a few specific people see outdated content, it’s browser cache. Each person clears their own (usually Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows or Cmd+Shift+R on Mac). If multiple people across different locations all see outdated content, that’s edge cache, and you need to clear Cloudflare’s cache.
What happens when you clear the cache
When you clear the cache, you’re telling Cloudflare to forget everything it has stored and get fresh copies from your server. Most of the time, this happens automatically when you update a blog post or add a new page. Sometimes, especially with major site updates, template changes, or custom functionality, the automatic clearing doesn’t catch everything. That’s when you need to manually clear the cache.
The cache clearing itself happens almost instantly across Cloudflare’s global network. Then the next person who visits your site from each region triggers Cloudflare to pull the fresh version from your server and cache it again. This means the first visitor after clearing might experience a slightly slower load time while Cloudflare grabs the new content, but subsequent visitors get the fast, cached version.
You should see your changes reflected within 30 seconds to a few minutes after clearing. If you clear the cache and immediately refresh, you might still see the old version for a moment. Give it a minute, clear your browser cache if needed, and check again.
One important thing: clearing the edge cache doesn’t clear browser caches. Someone who visited your site yesterday and has files stored locally will still see the old version until their browser cache expires or they manually clear it. This is why incognito or private browsing windows are useful for testing after clearing the cache. They start with a clean slate and show you what new visitors will see.
When to clear your cache (and when not to)
You’ll typically need to clear the cache when major design changes aren’t appearing for visitors, your homepage or key pages are showing old content, CSS or JavaScript changes aren’t taking effect, or new features aren’t visible to some users.
You probably don’t need to clear the cache when you’ve just published a new blog post (usually clears automatically), you’ve made minor text edits (give it a few minutes), or only you see the old version (clear your browser cache first).
Working with your cache
Most of the time, Cloudflare’s caching works invisibly in the background, making your site faster without any action from you. When you do need to clear it, the process is straightforward. Your hosting dashboard typically has a “Clear Cache” button, or your development team can handle it for you.
If you’re a Happy Sasquatch client, you’ll find a “Clear CF Cache” button in your WordPress admin bar when you’re logged in.
If you’ve just made changes and they’re not showing up immediately, don’t panic. The cache is doing its job. Try viewing in an incognito window, and if things still look wrong after a few minutes, that’s when you clear the cache. The slight delay in seeing updates is a small price to pay for the speed and reliability that keeps visitors on your site and converting. If you’re ever unsure or seeing inconsistent behavior, reach out to us and we’ll sort it out.