can someone explain what is the difference in accessing CSS in browser by putting question mark ? in the end and why the new CSS is not making any affects on Website.
I have deployed a new CSS on web server but its not making any affect.
I tried to open the URL in browser as below:
www.mysite.com/styles/css/main.css
and it loads the older version of CSS.
Then I tried it as below and it loads the new version of CSS.
www.mysite.com/styles/css/main.css?
After doing all this. New CSS change does not affecting the website. Its still displaying the old design.
Kind Regards
You need to add something after the ? then change it when you change the CSS. What is happening is a browser will cache anything that doesn’t change for a specific period, it does that by checking file names. so main.css? is still main.css? Anything after the question mark is a query string, generally it’s used to pass data to a particular file. In this case it’s just used to change the file string so the browser will update it every time it changes without affecting the file itself.
There are a couple of ways you can handle this, the first is manually changing the version, probably the easiest idea if you have a single header file, as in a template system that always loads the same head data.
Then on next change:
If you’d rather do it automatically you can add a bit of PHP script to the css line like this:
This is essentially adding a value that changes every time you save the file and results in something like this, the next time I save the file that time= value will change: