Style sheet updates, Chrome, and website visitors

Here's a scenario: I update my style sheet and upload it. In Google Chrome, I refresh my site and I don't see the changes. I have to clear the cache/hard refresh.

Okay, I understand that. But what about visitors to my site? The people visiting as I make this change, and the returning visitors? They're going to see a bit of a mess, because their Chrome browsers haven't updated the style sheet.

Is this a legitimate concern? Is there a process to account for this?

 

Sometimes servers (Web hosts) cache files. That's not the case for you if you can clear your cache in Chrome and see the changes.
You can control whether the browser clears the cache or not for most browsers.
You have to include headers in your server side code or use meta tags in your html header.

If you're using PHP you can do this:

header("Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate");// HTTP 1.1.
header("Pragma: no-cache");// HTTP 1.0.
header("Expires: 0");// Proxies.

Code (markup):

Meta tags are:

<metahttp-equiv="Cache-Control"content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"/>
<metahttp-equiv="Pragma"content="no-cache"/>
<metahttp-equiv="Expires"content="0"/>

Code (markup):

 

Change the filename of your CSS file that will cause it to use the new one.