Recently, I’ve diagnosed a few problems people have had because of their browser cache. Browsers can speed up page load times by keeping a cache on your local machine of the pages is has recently downloaded. When you reload a page, the browser can use that cached content locally, rather that re-downloading from the web.

If you are making changes to your site using the WP dashboard – editing a post, changing things using the Weaver admin panel – it is very easy for the browser to get out of sync with those changes. For outside users, this will essentially never be an issue – it is when you are making changes and reloading pages from the same computer. But when this happens, you can get all sorts of strange, seemingly unexplainable behaviors of your page.

I have found that Firefox is the best browser to develop web sites on – it is what I use to see what my changes look like. There is a Firefox plugin called Web Developer that does all sorts of wonderful things to pages that you’ve displayed on your Firefox browser. It is not that easy to use, but for the advanced web developer, it is an almost essential tool. For example, you can edit CSS rules right on the fly to see what is making things not look right. (All this, of course, requires working knowledge of HTML and CSS.)

One of its features that is not hard to use is “Disable Cache”. By using the Firefox command “Tools->Web Developer->Disable->Disable Cache” option, you can easily disable the cache, and avoid the need to manually clear the cache while you’re fine tuning your web pages.

With a little effort, you can probably learn about other Web Developer features, and make it easier to figure out how to get just the look you want from your web pages.