WordPress

As the owner of a WordPress website or blog you may know the situation: you artificially made some design changes in the admin area and as soon as you preview the page the changes are simply not there – no matter how hard you try. That’s when a technique called Cache Busting is required.

Cache is in the Way

One of the many reasons for this behaviour may be the browser’s caching mechanisms. Basically it makes a lot of sense for the browser to not reload all the Stylesheets and JavaScript files each and every time that a user visits your page because the frequency with that these files change in general is very low. That’s why a lot of websites instruct the browser to cache static files like CSS and JavaScript for e.g. 1 year. Therewith lots of bandwidth and downloading power on the browser side and requests on the server side is saved and the website can be rendered dramatically faster.
A good in-depth explanation of various browser caching mechanisms can also be found here.