Favicon not refreshed

marmite

Hi

I've changed the favicon for a website. Despite clearing 'everything' and even restarting the browser, the new favicon is not picked up and the old one is displayed.

This is as much of a concern from the point of the view that clearly 'everything' is not deleted in 'clearing private data' as it is that the new favicon isn't displayed.

mattythebatty

Is it showing the correct favicon in other browsers? If not, it might be cached elsewhere. For instance, if the website is using cloudflare, maybe it's being cached there. Or, if the favicon is a <link rel="icon" href="still-old-fav.png" /> perhaps the html is cached and linking to the old one?

marmite

No Matty, it's fine in other browsers and the link element is correct.

mattythebatty

I did a quick test with hard refreshes and dev tools open on some of my sites I can't see it making new requests for the favicons.

As a workaround you could try opening the image directly and hard refreshing.

marmite

You gave me an idea. I duplicated and renamed the favicon. The new image was picked up under the new name.

But if I then switch it back to the original name it reverts to displaying the old favicon. So it seems to cache not just the favicon but its URL too.

And in a bizarre twist if I'm looking at the page with the renamed favicon (and hence the correct one displayed) and I then 'view page source', that tab's favicon shows the old one!!

How would I do the 'hard refresh' you describe?

mattythebatty

Ctrl + F5 or Ctrl + Shift + R
Command + F5 or Command + Shift + R

Also, check to see if there is a favicon in the web root (favicon.ico). On some sites I've worked on, the front end had a <link/> favicon and the admin had none but used the favicon.ico file. The browser (possibly opera back then!) would automatically request it and if it was cached would not do so again. If so try going to yoursite.com/favicon.ico and trying the hard refresh there it might update it.

marmite

Ah right yes, I see what you mean. Sadly, that wasn't successful. There's definitely some dodgy caching going on; really surprised at what happened when I did a 'view source'.

Thanks Matty.