Browsers cache stylesheets, which is good. It keeps sites running faster. This is bad though if we make stylistic changes to the stylesheet when WordPress’s version isn’t upgraded (WordPress adds a version number to the stylesheet which coincides with the WordPress version number). A user’s browser which has already visited the website will not know that the stylesheet has been updated and will not download the latest one. We need to add a version number to the stylesheet call. WP Shout has a great article about this: https://wpshout.com/quick-guides/prevent-browser-caching-css-stylesheet-wordpress/.
To force a browser to load an updated stylesheet, we implement the following code in the functions.php file.
//Update the Stylesheet version wp_enqueue_style( 'theme-name', get_stylesheet_uri(), '', '2.0.1' );
The ‘theme-name’ is found by inspecting the code and determining the id. Such as:
<link rel=”stylesheet” id=”theme-name-css” href=”http://www.website.com/wp-content/themes/child_theme_name/style.css” type=”text/css” media=”all”>
The theme’s id is shown as id=”theme-name-css”. Our wp_enqueue_style code needs to point to the correct theme-name id (“theme-name-css” in this example) but without the “-css” on the end. Then we can include any arbitrary number, or version number in the last argument. In this example we use “2.0.1” (as a best-practice, we will increment our version number in the description of our child theme’s style.css file and include that same version number in this wp-enqueue_style function call). After the above code is implemented in the functions.php, the stylesheet call will look like this:
<link rel=”stylesheet” id=”theme-name-css” href=”http://www.website.com/wp-content/themes/theme_name/style.css?ver=2.0.1″ type=”text/css” media=”all”>
Note: This might not be an issue if your site uses a caching plugin that minifies css and js files; these caching plugins should include a versioning number for the minified files that should be cleared and updated when style changes are made – thus not giving us this versioning or cached issue.
