htaccess - How to force the client's browser to clear the cache?

Solution 1:

You can force browsers to cache something, but

You can't force browsers to clear their cache.

Thus the only (AMAIK) way is to use a new URL for your resources. Something like versioning.

Solution 2:

As other answers have said, changing the URL is a good cache busting technique, however it is alot of work to go through a bigger site, change all the URLs and also move the files.

A similar technique is to just add a version parameter to the URL string which is either a random string / number or a version number, and target the changed files only.

For instance if you change your sites CSS and it looks wonky until you do a force refresh, simply add ?ver=1.1 to the CSS import at the head of the file. This to the browser is a different file, but you only need to change the import, not the actual location or name of the file.

e.g:

<link href="assets/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

becomes

<link href="assets/css/style.css?ver=1.1" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Works great for javascript files also.