A “hard refresh” of your browser is a way to clear any locally stored content for quick access to a website, and force the browser to load all content from the server. The content is locally stored in your browser cache, and a hard refresh will clear the cache when a regular refresh will not. When you refresh a page in the browser by clicking on the refresh icon, it simply reloads the page and servers and locally stored content from the browser cache.
Doing a hard refresh helps ensure that you have the latest version of a website. This is particularly important in the context of Spruce if you encounter an issue with loading the web application and our Support team encourages you to "hard refresh" the browser to get out of the potentially bad state.
This article helps explain how to do a hard refresh on various browsers on Mac or Windows.
On Windows
Chrome: (Ctrl + Reload button) OR (Ctrl + F5)
Edge: (Ctrl + Reload button) OR (Ctrl +F5)
Firefox: (Ctrl + Shift + R) OR (Ctrl + F5)
On Mac
Chrome: (Shift + Reload button) OR (Command + Shift + R)
Firefox: (Shift + Reload button) OR (Command + Shift + R)
Safari: (Command + Option + R)