CSS file not refreshing in browser

Try opening the style sheet itself (by entering its address into the browser's address bar) and pressing F5. If it still doesn't refresh, your problem lies elsewhere.

If you update a style sheet and want to make sure it gets refreshed in every visitor's cache, a very popular method to do that is to add a version number as a GET parameter. That way, the style sheet gets refreshed when necessary, but not more often than that.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css?version=51">

A good way to force your CSS to reload is to:

<link href='styles.css?version=1' rel='stylesheet'></link>

And then just increment the version number as you change your CSS. The browser will then obey. I believe Stack Overflow uses this technique.

I always use Ctrl+Shift+F5 out of habit, it should force a full-refresh including by-passing any http proxies you may be going through.

This sounds like your browser is caching your css. If you are using Firefox, try loading your page using Shift-Reload.

The Ctrl + F5 solusion didn't work for me in Chrome.

But I found How to Clear Chrome Cache for Specific Website Only (3 Steps):

1. As the page is loaded, open Chrome Developer Tools (Right-Click > Inspect) or (Menu > More Tools > Developer Tools)
2. Next, go to the Refresh button in Chrome browser, and Right-Click the Refresh button.
3. Select "Empty Cache and Hard Refresh".

Since I found this thread having the same problem, 10 YEARS later, I'll add my own solution too. I use PHP most of the time, and rather than requiring the user to press unusual buttons to refresh the page, or myself to remember to bump a version number embedded in a link, I used the filemtime() function to get the modification time of the css file (as a unix timestamp), and then use THAT number as the parameter.

$FILE_TIME = filemtime("main.css");
$CSS_LINK  = "main.css?version=$FILE_TIME";

While results in a URL like:

http://example.com/blah/main.css?version=1602937140

This entirely disables caching, since every time the page is refreshed, it will believe it needs to grab the CSS file again, changed or not... but that's far less frustrating than forgetting to manually update this trick and wasting time wondering why it isn't right. You can always remove it from a production server.

If you are using plain HTML, you could probably engineer a javascript wrapper or some such, but that's probably more trouble than it's worth.

Have you tried renaming the new version of your CSS to CSSv2.css and then directing your page to use that? If that solves the stale-file issue, then you're just experiencing non-refreshing files. If not, you've got bigger issues.

Is this a local custom CSS file? Is this your website? Maybe you should clear your cache.

Also the last CSS declaration takes precedence.

The reason this occurs is because the file is stored in the "cache" of the browser – so there is no need for the browser to request the sheet again. This occurs for most files that your HTML links to – whether they're CDNs or on your server, for example, a stylesheet. A hard refresh will reload the page and send new GET requests to the server (and to external b if needed).

You can also empty the caches in most browsers with the following keyboard shortcuts.

Safari: Cmd+Alt+e

Chrome and Edge: Shift+Cmd+Delete (Mac) and Ctrl+Shift+Del (Windows)