// by Colin
You may have heard the terms ‘cache’ and ‘cookies’ before, and although similar, they are in fact very different. Both cache and cookies are a type of temporary storage designed to improve and tailor a user experience, by displaying the most relevant ads or saving passwords and other details for future use.
Many people don’t know the difference between cache and cookies. Therefore, this article will explain the difference, allowing you to better understand your web experience, and simultaneously increasing your safety, too.
What are Web Cookies?
These types of cookies aren’t edible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful! Cookies are small files that contain information regarding a website. For instance, this could be passwords, time of visit to the site, and certain preferences. Each time a user loads the site, the cookies are accessed and updated to restore your default settings and preferences.
More often than not, cookies are only used to store short-term data, but they are also used by websites to track user activity. For example, this could include clicks on web banners, items added to shopping carts, and the number of logins during a set period of time.
To put it simply: web cookies are super helpful and allow websites to tailor your visit to best suit your preferences, making your life easier and more customised to your liking. Without the use of cookies we would all see the same ads, be required to enter passwords each time we visit a site, and websites would be unable to track purchases or conversions.
What about caches?
A web cache (also sometimes referred to as an HTTP cache) is another form of temporary story, known as a ‘cache.’ The cache stores data, for example, web documents, HTML pages, images, and other data. This is done to reduce web bandwidth, improving loading times, and overall, providing a better and more stable internet connection and experience.
In simple terms, a cache is a temporary storage of a web page. Like cookies, however, for caches to work correctly, you must visit the website more than once. On your first visit, the content will need to load fully. However, on each subsequent visit, so long as the content remains the same, it will load near enough instantly. This does not apply to videos, but images will load much quicker, with text, banners, and any other immersive content.
Often, when a website fails to load, or you’re experiencing slow loading times, clearing your cache can be a good solution, essentially restarting the whole process and letting the website reload by itself.
How do you clear your cache on chrome?
Finally, many users struggle to clear their cache on chrome. Therefore, we’ve put together a short guide below:
● Open Chrome
● Click the “more” button located at the top right of the home page
● Now click “more tools” and then “clear browsing data”
● Select to delete the cache (you can also delete cookies here as well)
Clearing your cache may improve load times if these have suddenly gotten slower or won’t fully load. Furthermore, it’s also a further protective step when clearing your history.
To conclude
Many web users are unsure of the difference between the two popular terms, caches and cookies. However, when we break it down, these concepts are actually super easy to understand!
Cookies are used to store temporary data for things like passwords, preferences, and tailored ads, while a cache storages the website and its information, think images, text, and other content, both of which improve user experience.
