Page not displaying properly until refresh

Question

On my site, the page displays incorrectly in most browsers until you refresh it. THe website is: http://www.hqinternetsolutions.com/services.html

I dont know why it is displaying in this fashion and then it fixes itself on refresh (even without clearing cache)

It is a series of divs floated to the left with margin. Any idea?

Solution 1

The site looks consistent for me in IE in Windows and Firefox on Mac...

Depending on what browser and operating system your using, I recommend that you always HARD-REFRESH as it ensures that your always downloading the most recent styles/scripts/etc.

To perform a hard-refresh (instead of a regular refresh):
In Windows on Internet Explorer of Firefox: CTRL + F5

In OS X on Firefox: CMD + SHIFT + R

I also believe that you can also CMD + Click (or CTRL + Click) the Refresh button in your browser to achieve the same thing.

If you wanted to disable your cache temporarily...
You could also EASILY disable caching so that all page loads will grab the newest content (granted your using up bandwidth when you hard refresh).

I find the quickest and easiest way to disable cache is by using the Firefox Add-on Developer Toolbar:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60?collection_id=da0ecd99-2289-7ab0-7d57-e7c489c845c3

Hope that helps!

Solution 2

@n8wrl

Nothing personal, but I would like to correct the misconception that "Refreshing forces a re-load of everything even if it was in cache." I wish that were true! I could have saved hours and hours of debugging had I learned earlier that it did not force a full page refresh when you press F5

As you can see from the net tab of firebug here on xkcd AFTER a F5, GET grownups.png returns a 304 or "Not Modified" status. This instructs the browser to use the cached version on the users local machine because on the server it has not been modified. Most images, many scripts, css, static html files, and other mime types are cached on the clients machine, and are never re-downloaded - even when your press F5

To truly "refresh" the a page, you need to clear your cache by pressing CTR-SHFT-DLT, or other browser shortcuts that you may have.