Why aren’t my latest blog posts showing?

On average, I get an email about once a month asking “Why aren’t my latest blog posts showing on my home page?  The blog post is there, but it won’t show up on the home page.”  It’s a maddening issue that is becoming a pretty common problem.  Every single time someone has asked me that, they are using Bluehost.

Bluehost uses caching to reduce the load on their servers.  In plain English: they save a copy of your homepage and when someone visits your site, they show them a pre-loaded (older) copy instead of what your site is actually putting out right this minute.

Caching isn’t a bad thing; our own browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) do it and it makes our internet surfing experience much less frustrating.  (Read an explanation of it here.)  The difference is: we can control it when it is done on our own browsers.  When Bluehost decides to cache our website…there’s nothing we can do but wait for them to clear it.

For the first few clients that came to me when their homepage wouldn’t show the latest blog posts, I contacted Bluehost to try to get them to clear (also called flushing or purging) the cache, but they talked in circles and insisted that there was no problem.  (Even when I showed them screenshots of there actually being a problem.)  Most of them just read a script out of their manual that had nothing to do with anything.

So what are your options when your latest blog post isn’t showing?

1. Wait for the cache to clear on it’s own (usually between a few minutes and 24 hours)
2. Change to a higher quality host (my recommendation here)

I wish I had better news, but those are literally the only things you can do.

The good news if you decide to change to a higher quality host is that almost all of them will move your website for you at no extra charge.  You won’t have to lift a finger, just let them do the tech work and then get back to blogging as usual.  Only then, when you update your site, your visitors will actually get to see it.