I published, but the site still shows the old version
You approved the change, the app says it's live — and the page you're looking at is still the old one. Few things are more quietly maddening, because it makes you doubt whether the work happened at all.
It almost always did. What you're seeing is a remembered copy: your browser, your phone or a network between you and the site holding on to the page it fetched earlier. On a bernard-hosted site those copies are deliberately short-lived — minutes, not hours — so the ordinary cure is patience measured in moments, or a refresh in a private window.
What publishing actually does
When you press Approve, your change is made live and the site's stored copies are refreshed straight away. Bernard then checks its own work: it fetches the public page the way a visitor would and confirms the new version is really being served — and if an old copy survived the refresh, it clears it again automatically. So "the app says live" isn't a guess; it's been looked at.
When it's been more than a few minutes
That's the moment to stop refreshing and ask. Use the prompt above — your AI can tell the two situations apart:
- A remembered copy on your side. It will show you the page is fresh for everyone else and tell you so plainly — nothing to fix.
- A genuinely stuck copy out on the network. It can clear the site's stored copies and then re-check every address your site answers on — including your own domain — until what visitors see matches what you approved.
One thing it will never do is paper over the problem by rewriting your pages with version numbers or workaround links. If a copy is stuck, the copy gets cleared; your pages stay clean.
If the new version was the mistake
Sometimes the page IS live and the sinking feeling is about what you shipped. That's recoverable too — your site keeps its history, and any page can be put back exactly how it was.
The prompt
“I approved a change to [the page] a while ago but the live site still shows the old version — check whether it's really live, and if an old copy is stuck somewhere, clear it and confirm what visitors see now.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- How long should publishing take?
- About a minute. When you press Approve (or ask your AI to publish something you've told it to), the change is queued, made live, and the site's stored copies are refreshed — bernard then double-checks that the public page really serves the new version.
- I refreshed and it's still old — is it broken?
- Usually not. Your browser, your phone, or a network in between may hold on to a copy of the old page for a few minutes after a publish. If it's been longer than that, ask your AI to check — it can tell the difference between 'your browser is remembering' and 'an old copy is genuinely stuck', and clear a stuck one.
- Someone else sees the new version but I don't — why?
- That's the clearest sign it's a remembered copy on your side, not the site. Old copies expire within minutes on a bernard-hosted site, so give it a moment or open the page in a private window. If a private window ALSO shows the old version well after you approved, ask your AI to investigate.
- Can the fix itself break anything?
- No — clearing stored copies never changes your site's content, and nothing about your pages goes live without your approval. The worst case is the next visitor's page loads fractionally slower once while a fresh copy is fetched.