None of my store changes that I’ve made are visible! Is it Magento cache?

That was a recent support ticket we received at our Outsourced Technical Support department where we resolve support queries for web hosting providers.

Magento store owners change the website code or theme, but the site would still display the old content or style.

What’s wrong here?

Today, let’s discuss about Magento cache and the steps to manually clear Magento cache.

What is Magento Cache?

As you all know, a cache is a memory buffer used to temporarily store frequently accessed data.

Therefore, it improves performance by eliminating the need to fetch data from original location every time.

Similarly, Magento has a built in caching mechanism configured in Magento admin.

Magento cache system is used to improve website performance and load websites quickly and flawlessly.

You can see the Magento cache management feature in

Magento admin > System > Cache Management

If you have made some changes to your site and they are not reflected, it may be the Magento cache(old content).

Fortunately, Magento website owners have the option to clear the Magento cache from their Magento admin panel and they can manually clear it via SSH/FTP.

So, let’s now discuss the 2 easy methods for clearing Magento cache.

How to clear Magento cache?

There are 2 ways to clear the cache – automatically and manually.

But, the exact steps for manual deletion depends on your Magento version.

From our experience in dealing with Magento website issues, there are 2 major tools for clearing the Magento cache from admin panel:

• Flush Magento cache – Clear files created by Magento installation from the directory var/cache.
• Flush Cache storage – Clear files from var/cache directory regardless of whether the files are created manually or by Magento.

We’ll discuss the steps to clear these cache in Magento 2 and older versions.

In Magento 2

Our Support Engineers clear the Magento cache either via Magento admin panel or via SSH.

Let’s see both cases in detail.

1) Clear cache from admin panel

To clear the Magento cache from Magento admin panel, follow the steps below.

• Go to System > Cache Management.
  
• Click on Flush Magento Cache.
• Further, click on Flush Cache Storage.

2) Manually clear cache via SSH

Similarly, Magento allows you to clear the cache from command line as well.

After logging into your account via SSH, we execute the following commands from the Magento installation directory.

php bin/magento cache:clean
php bin/magento cache:flush

First command removes all enabled cache related to Magento and second command deletes whole cache storage whether it is Magento cache or any third party cache.

In Magento 1.x

In Magento versions 1.x, you can clear the cache via your Magento admin panel, SSH or FTP.

1) Clear cache from admin panel

Use the below steps to clear the cache from Magento admin panel.

• Go to System > Cache Management.
  
• Click on Flush Cache Storage.

2) Manually clear cache

Magento stores the cache files in the var/cache folder located in the Magento installation directory.

So, to clear the cache manually, you must delete the contents in var/cache directory.

Our Support Engineers remove the contents from this folder using either File Manager, FTP or SSH.

For example, we remove the files from var/cache directory using the below command.

rm -rf var/cache/*

Once you have cleared the cache, just refresh the website in the browser and you can see that the new changes are reflected.

Conclusion

To sum up, Magento website owners usually need to clear the Magento cache when updating website codes or themes. Sometimes, they have to clear the Magento cache manually. Today, we’ve discussed the steps to clear Magento cache from admin panel and SSH/FTP.