After making edits in my purchased theme’s css file, changes would not appear after refreshing the page. After trying lots of tricks and things that didn’t work, I noticed the following in my page’s code:
<link rel='stylesheet' id='app-css' href='http://www.mydomain.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/assets/css/app.css?ver=3.9.1' type='text/css' media='all' />
Supposedly WordPress is putting the “?ver=3.9.1” parameter behind the stylesheet url. When checking out the url with the parameter I could see the old stylesheet without my changes. When I removed the parameter I could see the correct stylesheet with my changes.
How can I have my site query the stylesheet url without that parameter? I’m also not sure why WordPress is doing this.
This article helped me out: http://www.agentwp.com/remove-ver-parameter-wordpress-css-js-files
Added the following to my functions.php file:
Seems like a caching prob.
Are you using the W3TC plugin? If so, click in the admin topbar on Performance > Empty all caches, and refresh your page.
What you also could try, is open the stylesheet in your browser http://www.mydomain.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/assets/css/app.css?ver=3.9.1, refresh this page, and open your site again.
This answer has been answered very nicely here: http://www.impressivewebs.com/force-browser-newest-stylesheet/
A hard refresh / clearing caches helps but for your end users (who might not bother to do a hard refresh on their end), updating version numbers is the way to go.