I'm developing a website based on WordPress source code through XAMPP. Sometimes I change the CSS code, scripts or something else and I notice my browser takes time to apply the modifications. This leads me to use multiple browsers to refresh one and if it doesn't apply the new styles I try the second one and it's always this.
There is some way of avoiding this problem?
Sometimes I'm changing code without noticing the previous modifications.
Check this: How Do I Force the Browser to Use the Newest Version of my Stylesheet?
Assumming your css file is foo.css, you can force the client to use the latest version by appending a query string as shown below.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="foo.css?v=1.1">
Developer point of view
If you are in development mode (like in the original question), the best approach is to disable caching in the browser via HTML meta tags. To make this approach universal you must insert at least three meta tags as shown below.
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" />
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
In this way, you as a developer, only need to refresh the page to see the changes. But do not forget to comment that code when in production, after all caching is a good thing for your clients.
Production Mode
Because in production you will allow caching and your clients do not need to know how to force a full reload or any other trick, you must warranty the browser will load the new file.
And yes, in this case, the best approach I know is to change the name of the file.
<script src="foo.js?<?php echo date('YmdHis',filemtime('foo.js'));?>"></script>
It will refresh if modify.
And I didn't see anyone going to the answer. Here is simple trick to get the external css loaded each time
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/myExternalCss.css?<?=time()?>">
In stead of link-tag in html-head to external css file, use php-include:
<style>
<?php
include("style.css");
?>
</style>
Kind of hack, but works for me :)
If you want to be sure that these files are properly refreshed by Chrome for all users, then you need to have must-revalidate in the Cache-Control header. This will make Chrome re-check files to see if they need to be re-fetched.
Recommend the following response header:
Cache-Control: must-validate
This tells Chrome to check with the server, and see if there is a newer file. If there is a newer file, it will receive it in the response. If not, it will receive a 304 response, and the assurance that the one in the cache is up to date.
If you do NOT set this header, then in the absence of any other setting that invalidates the file, Chrome will never check with the server to see if there is a newer version.
Here is a blog post that discusses the issue further.
I have decided that since browsers do not check for new versions of css and js files, I rename my css and js directories whenever I make a change. I use css1 to css9 and js1 to js9 as the directory names. When I get to 9, I next start over at 1. It is a pain, but it works perfectly every time. It is ridiculous to have to tell users to type .
I have a case, where I need to be able to create and change my stylesheets remotely affecting thousands of clients, but due to risk of heavy network load, I'm not turning off cache.
Since I can change the HTML contents remotely, I then link the stylesheet with a hashcode matching the contents of the stylesheet.
https://example.com/contents/stylesheetctrl?id=12345&hash=-1456405808
That said, I also use a client-side javascript function to carefully replace nodes and attributes when HTML contents change, meaning the stylesheet link tag will not be replaced, only the href attribute will change.
This scenario works fine in Chrome, Firefox and Edge on Windows, also Chrome on Android, but doesn't always work in webclients on Android to my surprise. So I'm more or less looking for something to force/trigger the update using javascript - optimally without needing to reload the page.
You can use the Firefox/Chrome developer toolbar: