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Speed Tips: Add Future Expires Headers

by Charles Torvalds 16 comments

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With Expires HeaderA first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.

Easy Apache Speed Tips Articles

Keep in mind, if you use a far future Expires header you have to change the component's filename whenever the file changes.

Add Future Expires Headers

This goes in your root .htaccess file but if you have access to httpd.conf that is better.

This code uses the FilesMatch directive and the Header directive to add Future Expires Headers to certain files.

<filesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

Without Expires Headers

No Expires Headers

With Expires Headers

With Expires Header

September 10th, 2007

Comments Welcome

  • http://www.aqworks.com Christophe

    It might be helpful for readers to also mention that you are using Yahoo's Yslow addon for the Firebug extension to get the analysis presented in the screen shots (without/with).

    YSlow for Firebug
    http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

  • Pete

    That middle part actually gives me 500 error. is there another way?

  • John

    Hi - having loading problems with my WP sites even though there's very little on them - bearing in mind I'm not a techie, I went to yslow to see if i could understand what was going on - my homepage response time is 13477ms - the details are below:

    Date  Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:44:50 GMT
Server  Apache
P3P  CP="PSA"
X-Pingback  http://mysite.com/xmlrpc.php
Expires  Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control  no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma  no-cache
X-Powered-By  W3 Total Cache/0.9.1.1
Vary  Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified  Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:44:52 GMT
Connection  close
Transfer-Encoding  chunked
Content-Type  text/html; charset=UTF-8

    One thing i notice is that there's an Expires date way in the past of 1984 - I have no idea what an Expires date is or what it means, but that doesn't look right at all - anyway, it might be irrelevant, i just don't know - would appreciate if you could explain what you think is going on here. Thanks

  • http://x-referat.ro referat

    Yeee haaa! I get a 95 points score because of your tip :X thanks alot man! keep up the good posts :X

  • http://devcha.com Slavi

    hm,

    Why adding Expires header to point to the past ?

    This will remove the warning from yslow but will make browsers not to cache files.

    Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
  • Aguitta

    Hello,

    Thanks, great content!. I want what is best for SEO, in terms of expiration date. I think it might be the "Present day".

    So in terms of SEO what is best? and how does that translate to code in the .htaccess?
    Thank you very mucho!

  • http://www.dukesgames.net/ Duke

    Where exactly do i add the code in the htaccess file.

  • http://rooturaj.com Pattanaik

    I get this working for all files withing my site.
    This time I went for some cloud CDN to serve static content. Now the htaccess is not supposed to be working for the cloud files so what to do?
    How do you tell the browser not to fetch content before a particular period ..from the clouds too????

  • http://jeeshenlee.wordpress.com/ JeeShen Lee

    Hello All,

    For ASP user like me, Expire Header can be turn on using web.config file. Refer my blog post below for more information.
    "How to Add Expires Headers in ASP.NET.

    I have tested in on GoDaddy Window Shared hosting and it works.

    Thanks.

    Regards,
    Jeeshen Lee.

  • http://models-hq.com miranda

    i have lot of images on my wp blog http://models-hq.com
    with 85 score. on firebug

    i need to know where to add the code in htaccess badly...

  • http://www.aloe-vera.org David H.

    I can't use it, apparently, on a site created with MS FrontPage (2000). I am using it between the tags, before the body tags.

    My site is on an Apache server.

  • http://www.pc-manden.dk pc-manden

    If your server doesn't support the module mod_expires.c, you'll get a 500 Server Side Error when trying to invoke it with Expires statements.

  • web design houston

    This could also be done with:

    ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000 # + 1 month after being accesed
  • http://zulutrade-fx.net/ zulu

    Nice. In this way, We don't need mod_expires.c.

  • henk

    ...and yet, nobody comes with an answer what to do when you're provides doesn't allow adding this code in your .htaccess...

    • http://www.askapache.com/ AskApache

      @henk ~

      I strongly suggest you switch to WiredTree.

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