There’s a website I like to check several times a day because I’m a Bears fan addicted to the latest trade scuttlebutt: Chicago Bears News & Rumors
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that the site won’t update unless I clear my browser cache at least once a day. This happens on my desktop and my phone, and doesn’t occur with any other sites I visit regularly.
Since the problem isn’t confined to one device or the other, I’m guessing it’s an issue with the site itself. Is that accurate? Or is there something else I need to do on all my devices?
Web servers and content delivery networks have methods of advising the browser how long something should be cached for. This can be through settings with names like “browser cache TTL” (time to live), “max-age”, and other things.
If the website, or their CDN, is configured wrong, then they can be telling your browser to cache things for too long for a news site. Logos and other static site content should have a long TTL, but the text of news stories, or dynamic content, should have it set much lower. Mess that up, and you get the exact results you see. So you reload the page, the browser sees that everything has a TTL of 604,800 seconds, so it just shows you what was there last time.
Supposedly you can press CTRL-F5 in most browser to reload directly from the site, bypassing the cache. I’ve always had very mixed results in that actually working.
There is a good chance, but it really is impossible for me to say. Something in your browser could have changed that is messing it up, but then it would probably affect other sites, too.
It can be their site. But do note that you can clear your cache for a single page by pressing Ctrl-F5 or holding down shift when you click the refresh button. (I’m not sure how to do it on mobile, but look up “hard refresh” for whatever browser you use).
The one way I could see it being a problem on your side is if it had to do with cookies. You might want to try clearing them. But, again, only clear them for the one site. On Chrome, I click the little lock symbol, and click “Cookies and Site Data” followed by “Manage cookies and Site Data.”
There is an off chance that rebooting will fix it. I had a problem yesterday with a link in a site that I was assured was live didn’t seem to be. I should have closed and reopened Firefox, but I rebooted and the problem went away. Who knew? Anyway, it is worth trying.
I downloaded the HTTP headers for https://www.sportsmockery.com/chicago-bears/ and I see this:
expires: Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:50:11 GMT
cache-control: max-age=16070400
While the duration in the Expires header is reasonably short, the Cache-Control header overrides it, and says that the entire site’s content can be cached for 186 days. There is no ETag header. This would seem to be a problem with the site’s configuration.
