Your website sits behind a global cache (a content delivery network). When a shopper opens a page, they are usually served a saved copy from a server near them instead of waiting for the platform to rebuild the page from scratch. This is what keeps your site fast, and it also protects your site during heavy traffic from search engines and AI crawlers.
The trade-off is that a saved copy can briefly lag behind a change you just made. The platform clears the right copies automatically whenever you make changes. This article explains which changes appear instantly, which refresh on a timer, and how long images take on each upload path.
Changes that appear right away
- Editing an item in Manage Inventory (price, status, description, quantity, or images on the item's edit page): the item's detail page and your home page are refreshed the moment you save. This applies in both the new admin and the classic admin.
- Inventory uploads: when an upload finishes, item pages and the home page are refreshed.
- Categories, catalogues, web pages, events, staff, and featured items: saving refreshes the related storefront pages, including listing pages and the home page.
- Site Discounts (putting the whole site or a category on sale): applying or removing a discount refreshes the entire site so the new prices show everywhere.
Pages that refresh on a timer
Search results and browse listings show many items at once, so rather than being cleared item by item, they refresh on a schedule. A change to a single item (a new price, an item selling out) can take up to an hour to appear on search and category listing pages. The item's own page is always refreshed immediately.
Your browser has a memory of its own
Separate from our cache, your web browser keeps its own copies of pages it has recently shown you, for up to an hour. Two things follow from this:
- While you are logged into your admin, caching never applies to you. You always see the live site fresh.
- If you view your site logged out (as shoppers do), your browser may keep showing its own saved copy for up to an hour, even after our cache has already been refreshed. A hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R, or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac) or a private/incognito window always shows the true current state. If you are checking whether a change went through, an incognito window is the most reliable test.
Images: how long each upload path takes
Images reach your site three ways, and they are not all instant:
- On the item's edit page: images added, replaced, or deleted there are processed immediately. The image and the item's page both refresh right away.
- The Upload Images tool: files are queued for a background job that optimizes and resizes them. Small batches usually finish within a few minutes; large batches take longer.
- File transfer (FTP): images you send by file transfer are picked up on a schedule, roughly every 15 minutes. They are then optimized and resized before going live. For a typical batch, allow 15 to 30 minutes end to end. Very large batches can take noticeably longer, since every image is individually processed.
When background processing finishes, both the images and the item pages that display them are refreshed automatically. If you replaced an image and still see the old one after the processing window, it is almost always your own browser's saved copy. Check in an incognito window before assuming something went wrong.
If something still looks stale
- Check the page in a private/incognito window first. This rules out your own browser's memory, which is the most common cause.
- For images sent by file transfer or the Upload Images tool, allow up to 30 minutes (longer for very large batches).
- For search and browse listings, allow up to an hour.
- Edit pages in the admin have a Clear cache link near the Save button. It re-clears that record's images and pages on demand.
- If a page is still wrong after all of the above, contact support and include the exact page address and what you expect to see.