Why deleting and recreating a Vercel project clears stale cache only?

Description

Hi, I have a Next.js (v15.3.2) app deployed on Vercel. Every push to my single branch (main) results in a successful build, but the production URL stubbornly serves the previous version of my site. Even after using Redeploy → Clear Cache & Redeploy, manually purging the edge cache, and verifying my Cache-Control headers, the new code never appeared.

What “Fix” Worked

Deleting the Project: Removing the project from Vercel’s dashboard and re‑linking my Git repo.
Recreating & Redeploying: First deploy on the fresh project immediately reflected my latest commit.

I want to understand that -

Why does deleting the project purge all layers of cache (build, edge, data) and metadata (env vars, framework presets, domain aliases) when explicit cache‑clear commands did not?
Is there a non‑destructive way (CLI/API or configuration) to achieve the same “clean slate” effect without deleting the project?
Could this behavior indicate an underlying bug in Vercel’s cache‑invalidation logic or my project setup?

Hi , welcome to the Vercel Community!

Sorry that you faced this issue.

Build cache, deployment cache (Edge cache), and data cache are different. When you click "Redeploy without cache" it rebuilds the app without using the using the build cache.

The Edge cache is unique for each deployment. For more information, see the docs.

However, the Data cache is persisted across deployments. To learn more, see https://vercel.com/guides/share-vercel-cache-across-deployments-nextjs.

Now, depending on your code configuration it may be possible that your code use Data cache that didn't invalidate and hence generated the same pages across builds.

Can you share your public repo or a minimal reproducible example. That will let us all work together from the same code to figure out what’s going wrong.

Oh I see, this is a private project so can't share the code right now. But anyway thanks for clarification. One things to mention that in this project I am using three Js library. Is this causing any issue by chance ?