How to Clear Your Cache and Cookies

By Jeff Belmont

Many of you may have heard of your web browser’s “cache” and “cookies”. A lot of people are familiar with the vernacular, but are unaware of just what cache and cookies do, and why they’re stored in the background as you surf the web. We’ll provide a synopsis of what they are, why they’re used, and how to clear them, should they give you any difficulties with certain web pages.

Cache
Cache exists for the purpose of making accessing a web page quicker after you have visited it for the first time. When you have visited a web page, information about that page is stored on your local storage drive (also known as a hard drive or solid state drive) behind the scenes. That information remains in a discrete folder for future reference – i.e., when you revisit the page, the computer references the cache about that page. If the page has not been modified, then the computer will use the information in cache to load the page (much quicker), rather than download the contents of the page again.
The trouble here is webpages are modified at some point, over time. They may be altered simply to update the layout, links, use a different font, etc. When these changes are made, it conflicts with the cache on the user’s end; they may be presented with inaccurate or outdated information, or they may have difficulties loading the page at all.

Cookies
Cookies are also stored discretely while visiting websites. A cookie, however, contains different data than cache. While cache is meant for storing information about a page on a temporary basis for quicker access to the page in future visits, cookies store different data that can be accessed by either the user’s computer or the server that contains the website. For example: let’s say you visit site “abc”, then a few minutes later, you head over to “xyz”. The cookies communicating between your computer and the web server will see that information, and perhaps load content relevant to site “abc” onto the page you’re looking at, at “xyz”.
Because of the nature of cookies, there are also some privacy and security concerns. Usually, they’re seldom alarming or an egregious invasion of privacy, although some may design particular cookies to track your activity, so that they can tailor ads to you, or worse.

So how and why do we delete cache/cookies?
Although cache and cookies certainly play a role in making web browsing a little quicker – therefore, a little more convenient – we may feel inclined to clear them out periodically. Sometimes, it can even be necessary in order to access a particular webpage.
Every web browser has a feature to clear its cache and cookies from within the browser itself (pardon my forthcoming nebulous description, but there are simply so many web browsers on the market; too many to cover in a synopsis). Doing so typically entails rummaging through the options menu; sometimes the settings for cache and cookies are found with the options for your history.
Another way to delete your cache and cookies is to use the disk cleanup wizard in Windows, or to download a third party program that does essentially the same. Many people prefer the latter, though everyone has their preference in regards to which program they use.
Lastly, you could navigate to the temporary internet files directory where things are stored and delete the data manually, although this is more tedious and not ideal for most (and takes a little more technical knowledge in navigating the operating system’s directory tree).