Chrome has a nasty habit of defaulting to “historical” web content for pages that have been updated. Sometimes even clearing your history doesn’t stop it from doing this. I’ve recently discovered that there is a way around this problem called a “hard reload”. To force Windows Chrome to refresh the page content, hold down the shift key and click on the “reload” button. Two other keyboard shortcut methods for this are Ctrl-Shift-R or Shift-F5. This forces Chrome to go to the source (server or hard drive if you are loading it from there) and retrieve a fresh copy of the webpage. Chrome is pretty stubborn though, so you may need to do this more than once.
Chrome actually has three types of “reload” functions. The first is a “normal” reload that is accomplished by clicking on the reload button or by using the keyboard shortcuts F5 or Ctrl-R. But as stated above, Chrome loves retrieving from cache – it’s faster and easier. The second method is the one I first described, the “hard reload”. But there is a third method called “empty cache and hard reload”. This latter method is somewhat hidden. You need to open the browser’s Developer Tools with the keyboard shortcut F12. From here, you Right-click on the reload button to display the reload menu. It includes the “empty cache and hard reload” option that you may want to use. What this does is clear the browser cache before the hard reload is activated.
What’s the benefit of clearing the cache since hard reloads bypass the cache? This method takes situations into account where webpages may download additional content using JavaScript or other means that are not part of the initial page load process. These resources may be cached and as a consequence may be loaded from cache even if you do a hard reload.
Please note that the first two methods will likely work in most Windows browsers. For Macs, try substituting using Cmd-R.