Why won't my website updates show up after uploading new files?

This issue of website updates not appearing despite uploading new files to S3 is commonly related to caching. Here are several potential causes and solutions:

1. CloudFront Caching: If you're using CloudFront as a CDN in front of your S3 bucket, it's likely serving cached versions of your files. You need to create an invalidation for the specific files or paths (e.g., "/*" to invalidate everything) in your CloudFront distribution.

2. Browser Caching: Your browser might be storing old versions of your website. Try clearing your browser cache or using incognito/private browsing mode to see if the changes appear.

3. CloudFront Edge Location Updates: When you make changes to your distribution, CloudFront propagates these changes to all edge locations, which isn't instantaneous. One edge location might have updated content while others still serve the old version.

4. TTL Settings: Check your CloudFront distribution's Time to Live settings. If set too high, outdated content might be served for longer periods.

5. Invalidation Scope: Ensure your CloudFront invalidations cover all necessary paths.

To resolve this issue:

• Perform a complete invalidation of your CloudFront distribution
• Wait for the distribution's "Last Modified" status to change from "Deploying" to a date and time
• Consider implementing content versioning for your files
• Set appropriate Cache-Control headers for your content
• Check if your distribution has the correct alternate domain names configured

If you've recently migrated your site between accounts or distributions, verify that your DNS settings are pointing to the correct CloudFront distribution.
Sources
Static site not displaying updates even if cloudfront distribution url is showing changes | AWS re:Post
AWS S3 Bucket having issue with a CSS file updates | AWS re:Post
Controlling how long Amazon S3 content is cached by Amazon CloudFront - Hosting Static Websites on AWS
Cloudfront serving a different version of content from an S3 bucket | AWS re:Post
S3 static Website not syncing with my CloudFront | AWS re:Post

I suspect your page is cached in your browser or even in the proxy if you are using one. To check if it's the browser, use incognito, and see if the correct page loads. To check if it's the proxy, use your mobile device, use mobile internet and load the page.

That's not it. I checked it on firefox private browsing and brave, I rarely use these browsers, and it's still not updating to my latest changes. I can see that the date has changes on the files in S3 but the files and pages just will not update on my webpage.

Why is this so hard to do in AWS? There is no button to clear the server cache? Is there no way at all to do this in the S3 page? I am not a professional website designer, I shouldn't have to deal with this kind of hassle. It should be easy as pie to update files like this. I've been messing with this for the past couple days trying to get it to work and the files just won't update.