4 Reasons Why Your Joomla Article Updates Are Not Reflecting Immediately

During the past 13 years, we had our fair cases where updates to Joomla articles were not reflecting immediately. We have finally decided to make a quick list containing the 4 reasons of why your changes to a Joomla article are not reflecting or are reflecting but not immediately (it only took us 13 years to take this decision). So, without further ado, here they are:

1. You are working on the wrong website.

   Believe it or not, this still happens to us! This problem typically happens when either your hosts file was changed to reflect a staging environment (but your forgot to change it back), or you are working on the staging environment instead of production.

2. The System – Page Cache plugin is enabled.

   Unfortunately, Joomla’s main caching plugin, the System – Page Cache plugin, still doesn’t take into consideration the fact that people change their articles after they are published. As such, when this plugin is enabled, changes to your Joomla articles are not reflected unless you clear the cache (or the cache is expired and it has to refresh). We have developed a caching plugin that addresses this issue and we may later release it for free on our website.

3. A server caching module is caching your pages.

   One of the most annoying features that a system administrator can deploy and enable on a production server is a caching module, such as OPCache. The annoyance is exponentiated when the system administrator doesn’t inform the people using the server of this feature (which what usually happens in almost 100% of the cases), because the changes they make to their Joomla articles are not reflected immediately, and they have no idea why. Typically, a quick solution to this problem would be to disable the server caching module in the .user.ini file, like we did when we disabled the OPCache caching module for a client who was experiencing the same problem.

4. You are working on the right website, but some DNS changes are taking effect.

   This happens, for example, when you are switching the website from one server to another, and you are working on the new server, but you are still seeing the website on the old server. We did experience this very weird issue once before, and we were only able to solve the mystery once the witness the client gave us more background.

We hope that you found this post useful and informative. If you are having a problem with your article changes not being reflected on your Joomla website, then most likely the cause of the problem is listed above. If you still need help, then you can always contact us. Our fees are always right, our work is professional, and we really care about our clients!