Old content appearing on site. Auto Clear Cache?

Question

I have a website that is updated regularly and I am having a problem where old content is showing up on the page. It can be fixed by refreshing a few times or clearing the cache. I am looking for a solution so no data is stored on the PC and the site is forced to refresh each time. Perhaps an auto cache clear plugin or something of the like? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try putting this in your head tags

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">

Edit Just a note, this doesn't force the browser not to cache it, but most browsers will listen

Answer 2

This may sound like a good idea at first but how many users do you hope to support in the future?

I ask becuase if every request should be completely refreshed every time you are going to have a LOT of traffic on your web server. And, your users are going to start complaining about page load times.

With help from tools like yslow and firebug, we've tried to analyze the portions of our pages that can be cached and those that can't. Tip of the iceburg, but...

Images to support site layout - backgrounds, buttons, etc. should be cached for a very long time. They go in a folder tree flagged by IIS as cachable for a long time. They could be delivered by a CDN long-term. If these have to change, we upload new files with new names.

Script/CSS and other, possibly-changing content goes in another folder that gets a shorter cache duration. This could be a problem if we have to fix bugs, but again, uplaod a new file with a new name if necessary.

Anything data-driven (our app is a catalog) is localized and gets refreshed every time.

This is still a work-in-progress for us, but we're seeing MUCH less server traffic and MUCH faster page load times.

I hope this helps!