Wordpress style.css not updating, only after theme reload

Question

I am using Bootstrap to put together a Wordpress. I update all my files locally and upload them through Sublime's SFTP. I also use Cyberduck to double check whether changes have gone through fully. Everything is going pretty smoothly and I can change files with ease, and see them updated with a simple refresh. However when it comes to the style.css file, updating is a doozy. I make my changes to the file, upload them, but see no changes reflected when I reload. To see the changes I have to reload the theme then make the change, upload the changed file via SFTP and reload. However, I can only do this once before refresh doesn't work any more.

In my header.php I load style.css using this php function:

<link href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" rel="stylesheet">

If it helps, I'm learning from this tut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJrGP9X2_bQ

Thank you :)

Answer 1

The proper way to add a style, as in a template or in a theme, is to use the wp_enqueue_style function. See https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_enqueue_style/ .

One of the parameters in the function is a version number, which you can change if you make changes to the CSS in the file. That will force WP into loading the new version, and not to use a cached version of the file.