It seems we may have a mix of issues here that all sound similar but are likely not and it’s usually best to start your own thread.
That said, I think some might be having cache issues but not all. Cache busting can be a painful task even for the most experienced of developers. It really requires an understanding of all caching mechanisms that could be in play.
For most of my sites, there are at least 4 separate cache layers that each need to be addressed.
– browser cache – right-click and choose inspect to open the browser debugger and now you can right-click the refresh button to see the option “Empty Cache and Hard Reload” just be aware that with G’s Chrome browser, if you are logged into a G account synced with the browser, some caching is provided through the cloud services and clearing browser cache doesn’t always work until one logs out of G services completely.
– WordPress caching – There is a whole host of plugins and caching options and each will need to be checked and cleared after making any edits. Sometimes WordPress helps the browser cache along by adding version strings to scripts and style sheets telling the browser to load the old version. There are many write ups on how to remove these url vars containing version numbers as a means to force flush.
– Host level caching – Often there is tools like Cachewall within your hosts cpanel or dashboard and these can be some of the most aggressive and often overlooked too.
– DNS/external 3rd party caching service like Cloudflare. In this case, visitors receive your website’s content from Cloudflare and not directly from your website. Cloudflare acts as the middle man, pulling content from your server when requests come in and keeping a cached layer to serve up must faster to your visitors. As the OP suggested, with Cloudflare you can enable the development mode which allows all caching to purge and halt for a period of 4 hours. This feature is even built into their WordPress plugin.
Ok, as for some others here, I don’t think it is cache related. I think some of you may have some themes or plugins with stronger css declarations in which Elementor’s generated css becomes overridden. Learning how to use the browser’s inspect tool and read the css style properties is crucial and there are all kind of tutorials on the net.
Especially in the case of seeing the Elementor styling apply to the preview window when editing but the front end doesn’t reflect this, inspecting the code will reveal if this is a caching issue (i.e. the recently changed Elementor styles are not present anywhere in the code at all) or if it’s a theme/plugin with stronger written css and you can see the Elementor styles crossed out.
The reason for this is because the theme/plugin that is causing this has rules built for the structure that matches the code generated on the front end while in Elementor’s editor, the code structure is slightly different with different classes, wrapper divs etc and the underlying theme or other plugin’s css does not apply because the html structure doesn’t match their css declarations.
This is where posting your own thread can help because we can focus on each individuals problem, review their example urls and inspect the code so we can better help determine cache vs css vs a bug/conflict.
Another possibility for some of you is some other code malfunction is happening where it sounds like you are making edits within Elementor, seeing the changes in the preview, saving and then viewing on the front end and somehow losing the styling altogether (possibly even previous styling pre-edit) and when going back to the editor, all previously set styles have been reset as if the Element was just dragged into the editor. If this is the case, we really need to troubleshoot this on an individual basis. There could be missing files or some other conflict causing this where clearing cache and checking css code is not going to fix this problem.
