Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control

1. Other Speed Tips
   1. Apache Caching Guide
   2. htaccess time cheatsheet
2. htaccess Guide Sections

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Reader Comments

1. AskApache ~April 26, 2012 @ 7:42 am

   @Mike

   Yes. Try using the RequestHeader to rewrite the cache headers for specific IPs. Or set an environment variable when the visitor IP is the single IP to target, then only send the various anti-caching Header directives when that environment variable is present.

2. Mike ~April 24, 2012 @ 8:36 pm

   What if I want to disable cache specifically for a single IP address, while everyone else who browses the site gets a standard length? Right now I'm trying this code below, but it's disabling the cache for everyone, not just the intended target.

   allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
   Header set Pragma "no-cache"
   allow from all
   Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public"

   Is this possible?

3. Kristy ~January 17, 2012 @ 2:53 pm

   I found this site as I was editing the .htaccess to improve performance and to block spammer and proxies.

   Your site explained it very well. Almost everywhere else was just badly written.

   Perhaps if your interested I can send you an optimized htaccess file that blocks most content scraper, spam bots and lots of caching (browser as well as server side)...

4. tophi ~August 30, 2011 @ 4:12 am

   And what about ppl using Nginx ?

5. Flasheur ~August 26, 2011 @ 3:55 am

   Hi, very interesting stuff! I just noticed a little mistake in the "caching with mod_expires" part, the ExpiresDefault parameter for 1 year should be A29030400 instead of A9030400 according to the time cheatsheet. Thanks again for your article.

6. Danny ~July 13, 2011 @ 2:32 pm

   I used Caching with both mod_expires + mod_headers but I received a 500 error. Website is being hosted by earthlink.

7. ravi ~June 20, 2011 @ 8:41 am

   this solved my problem .thanks for this useful post

8. Review Monsters ~April 9, 2011 @ 2:58 pm

   Thank you for this post, easy to follow and has really decreased our load time. Thank you again!

9. Aneeza Mubbashir ~April 7, 2011 @ 2:39 am

   Thanks for the article. I have been searching for a long time trying to figure out how to use header expires, this was extremely helpful. You can count on me for a few links here and there!

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11. Eric Gillette ~January 27, 2011 @ 4:00 pm

    This definitely helped!

    I have a client with a wildy popular blog and they were having lots of site slow-downs.

    After setting this up in httpd.conf, the rest was history!

    Everything is a bit faster now! Thanks so much.

12. Tig ~January 20, 2011 @ 11:50 am

    One of the greatest articles i found on the web. Thanks.

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14. fara ~September 13, 2009 @ 3:07 pm

    thanks... very useful article that saved me from searching.
    good luck

15. Frank ~February 2, 2009 @ 11:09 am

    I find these code quite interesting and i have noticed a better performance in my blog already. What i would like to know if i can use the first code at the beginning of this page:

    # Turn on Expires and set default to 0
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresDefault A0
     
    # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
    ExpiresDefault A29030400
    Header append Cache-Control "public"
     
    # Set up caching on media files for 1 week
    ExpiresDefault A604800

    ... with this other one:

    # 1 YEAR
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
     
    # 1 WEEK
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
     
    # 2 DAYS
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, proxy-revalidate"
     
    # 1 MIN
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=60, private, proxy-revalidate"

    Since i am not into these things it looks like if i use both of them my website is faster, but i would like an input from you to see if i am right or now.

    Also, i understand the second code i wrote in this comment but.. what is the difference between these two codes simply put? thanks and i hope to get a reply from you

16. Erik Bauffman ~October 23, 2008 @ 9:33 am

    I was wondering. Say I want to my .css files to be cached for 15 minutes, my .html files for another 30 minutes and no cache at all for my .php files. How can I do this easily ?

17. Jason ~April 7, 2008 @ 8:24 pm

    Thanks for the article. I have been searching for a long time trying to figure out how to use header expires, this was extremely helpful. You can count on me for a few links here and there!

18. Daniel ~August 12, 2007 @ 9:44 am

    I couldn't understand some parts of this article o.us poetry, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.