If your browser’s running a bit slow, hard refreshing it may be one solution. Here’s how to hard refresh any browser.

Sometimes, a website does not behave as expected or seems stuck showing outdated information. To fix this, it’s easy to force your browser to completely reload its local copy of the page (cache) using a simple keyboard shortcut. Here’s how to do it.

There are also keyboard shortcuts to perform the equivalent hard refresh. Because there are multiple ways to do the same action, they will be listed below:

• Chrome, Firefox, or Edge for Windows: Press Ctrl+F5 (If that doesn’t work, try Shift+F5 or Ctrl+Shift+R).
• Chrome or Firefox for Mac: Press Shift+Command+R.
• Safari for Mac: There is no simple keyboard shortcut to force a hard refresh. Instead, press Command+Option+E to empty the cache, then hold down Shift and click Reload in the toolbar.

Why Clear Browser Cache?

Ideally, the browser should detect if a newer file exists on a page and update its cache accordingly by downloading only what it needs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always occur so, new changes or updates on a website may not be immediately visible to a user with the site cached.