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Why a Link Can Still Point to Your Old URL After You Changed It

Field Note #122
🔬 Generalized 🟡 Intermediate ⏱ 5 Minutes ✓ Observation from Experience
You update a setting — maybe a redirect destination, an embed source, a linked account — expecting every affected link on your site to now point to the new place. Instead, some (or all) of them stubbornly keep sending people to the old destination.

What’s actually happening
For performance reasons, many sites don’t rebuild every single page from scratch on every visit — they cache a finished version and serve that instead, refreshing it only occasionally. If a page was cached before you changed the setting, that cached copy has the old destination baked into it. Changing the setting doesn’t retroactively reach into already-cached content and update it — the cache doesn’t know anything changed.

How to tell the difference
If a newly created page or post correctly uses the new destination, but older content that existed before your change still shows the old one, that’s the signature of stale caching rather than the setting itself failing to save.

The fix
Quick fix: open the specific affected page and resave/republish it — that usually forces a fresh version to be generated with the current setting
If it’s happening broadly across many pages: clear your site’s cache entirely (there’s often a dedicated “clear cache” button in your hosting dashboard or caching plugin)
Longer-term fix, if you or a developer control the caching logic directly: build the cache so it automatically invalidates itself the moment the relevant setting changes, rather than relying on someone remembering to manually clear it every time.

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