How To Flush Your DNS Cache

When you type a website into your address bar, your computer doesn’t actually know where to go on its own.

- Whitson Gordon

Instead, it looks up that address on a Domain Name System (DNS) server, which matches it with an IP address for your computer to visit.

To speed this process up, your computer saves some of these entries for easy access later on. This allows your computer to navigate to sites you’ve already visited without asking the DNS server every time. Unfortunately, on rare occasions, this cache can cause problems.

Maybe the site you’re visiting changed servers and is no longer located at the cached address, or maybe you have some malware that’s trying to redirect common pages to malicious sites. Whatever the case, you can “flush” your DNS cache to start from scratch, so your computer looks up web addresses on the DNS server again.