Major CSS Changes, Force Browsers To Grab New Stylesheet on WordPress Website


About The Author
Cabe Nolan is the founder of WP Cover where he shares his insight into WordPress, development, & entrepreneurship. Outside of WPCover, Cabe continues to run a successful WordPress development firm, Bold City Design as well as a few high profile websites, Arrivala, Two Way Resume, Dock Skipper, and a successful outdoors brand, DolfinPack.







Major CSS Changes, Force Browsers To Grab New Stylesheet on WordPress Website

I did a major overhaul on a WordPress site recently. All the changes were done in a staging environment and the main stylesheet was completely overhauled. The release of the new site went perfectly except for one issue: this site used major caching to decrease load times. I attempted to force clear the cache many times from my Cloudflare CDN control panel but certain devices just wouldn’t grab the new file.

I tried explaining to the client what was going on and while they understood it was a valid concern that this may be occurring to other visitors as well who frequently visited their site. So what could I do?

Assign versioning to the stylesheets using wp_enqueue_style!

Previously, I had declared the stylesheets within my functions.php file without adding a version. For example:


wp_enqueue_style( 'style-css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/style.css');

However, there are additional parameters that can be declared using wp_enqueue_style including:

  • Dependencies
  • Version
  • Media

Dependencies – these are other stylesheets that this stylesheet needs before it can load. For example, if you want bootstrap.css to load prior to style.css, bootstrap.css could be a dependency.

Version – this allows us to specify a version of the file such as 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, etc. (more on this in a second).

Media – This allows us to specify which screen size the file should be loaded on such as max-width:767.

So in order to fix my problem today, let’s add a version to our wp_enqueue_style function. It’s pretty simple:


wp_enqueue_style( 'style-css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/style.css', array(), '2.0' );

As you see, I’ve declared a blank array for the dependencies, as there’s nothing this stylesheet depends on in this case. I’ve then added a version number to the next parameter. Just like that, browsers notice that the version of the stylesheet has changed and they are forced to grab the newest version when a user accesses the site.


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