Are you observing WordPress changes not showing on mobile or desktop despite waiting a few minutes? If yes, you have to follow this post to set a few things straight to get the changes reflected immediately.
A website is meant to be frequently updated where we edit old posts and add new posts. While doing so, we need to cross-check these updates on a browser to ascertain the changes.
In this post, we will learn a few steps to follow when we notice WordPress changes not reflecting on a browser.
Correct Way to Update or Publish
First of all, we have to ensure that we are not making a silly mistake while publishing a new post or updating an old one.
For a new post, please press the ‘Publish’ button, as shown below, to release the post on the Internet.
Note that the ‘Save draft’ button keeps the post in draft mode only and is restricted to us.
With WordPress’s inbuilt mechanism to edit a post, we have to press the ‘Update’ button to finalize the changes.
If you are using the Revisionize plugin for editing posts, then the mechanism is similar to that of a new post.
Entering Direct URL in Browser
After ensuring that the mistake is not at our end, we will take another step towards resolution. Now, enter the URL of your post directly into any browser.
If WordPress changes are not showing there, it is a browser cache issue. Press the F5 button on the keyboard to refresh the browser. The problem will most probably go away.
If you still are seeing the issue, you have to clear the browsing data of the browser. Another way is to use a different browser or incognito mode of the browser.
Search Engine Propagation
As a next stage, to reflect your new post in the search results and to let search engines know about changes on your website, you have to take a few actions. The first among them is sitemap creation.
Sitemap Creation
Search engines will come to know about changes on your website after crawling it. However, there are millions of websites, and a search engine can’t crawl your site daily.
A search engine must go through all your posts and cross-check with old records to find updates. That sound like a costly affair! However, there is a smart way available in the form of sitemaps.
A sitemap is an XML file that tells search engines about the pages available on a website and their last update. Search engines go through this file on your website to quickly update their records.
There are free plugins available for WordPress, which will automatically do the work of creating and updating a sitemap for your site. However, if you are using Yoast SEO plugin for SEO optimization, then no need to install a separate plugin. Please see the notification shown below from Yoast SEO in this regard.
If you are still not using Yoast SEO plugin, then please go through the below post to find its review:
Google Search Console
Even with a sitemap, your new posts or changes in old posts will be detected by search engines only when they crawl the sitemap.
You can shorten this time by requesting Google to index a page again. For that, we have to use the Google search console to put a request.
Kindly add your site to the Google search console. Post that, you can use the URL inspection tool available in it to put a request for indexing. This can be done for both new posts as well as old posts.
For a new post, the tool is of much importance for quickly gaining visitors as Google will only start showing your post in search results after coming to know about it.
Summary
In this post, we have gone through a few steps needed to resolve the WordPress changes not updating issue. These are:
- The correct way to update an old post and publish a new post.
- Browser cache issue.
- Sitemap creation.
- Google search console submission for indexing.
If you have any doubts or queries related to this post, then please drop a comment below. If this post has been useful, then kindly let me know through a comment!
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