Magento users sometimes experience issues with their site where changes do not automatically take effect. Sometimes this issue can simply be resolved by restarting the website or website application pool. The underlying cause however could be the Magento Cache files. Magento maintains cache in the var/cache/ directory where Magento is installed for the website.
There are a couple of ways of clearing your Magento cache. We recommend using your Magento admin interface as the cleanest option of clearing your Magento cache.
For Magento 1.9 and older login to your Magento admin panel and clear the cache by going to System > Cache Management > Flush Cache Storage
For Magento 2+ users login to your Magento admin panel and clear the cache by going to System > Tools > Cache Management. Select Flush Magento Cache. Once this completes, select Flush Cache Storage.
The second option for clearing cache is performed manually, which is not as clean as clearing the Magento cache via your Magento admin interface. This option should be used at your own discretion. The manual option is to connect to your site via FTP and access the var/cache/ directory. Delete all file and folder contents within this directory. You will then need to restart your website or website application pool for the Magento cache to actually clear. Without doing so you may experience issues.
At the time this article was written, Magento does not have a setting for automatic periodic cache cleanup. This causes accumulation of cache files which build up over time and will impact disk space usage. Another benefit of periodically cleaning your cache files is the reduction of the amount of disk space used. So if you are a Magento user who wants to maintain minimum disk space quota, periodically clearing your Magento cache should help.
If there are any questions, please contact us to assist you.