Speed Tips: Add Future Expires Headers

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Speed Tips: Add Future Expires Headers

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.

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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

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Reader Comments

  1. Ela ~

    Please can you explain me how to setup this expire header to the httpd.conf file. I have access to httpd.conf through ssh.

  2. Aaron Braun-Duin ~

    I have implemented this code in the htaccess of my Wordpress blog, however, I am still getting an F from YSlow for not having expires headers on the adsense code on my site. Is there any way to remedy that, or is that not really having any significant effect on my loading speed despite the poor score? Thanks.

  3. Michael ~

    Thanks for the great content. I came across your site as I was trying to fix a caching problem on one of my websites. I’m a bit of a novice when it comes to caching and did a lot of damage to my site this past week experimenting with far future expires header.

    In your post, you say

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

    I would be very grateful if you could point me in the right direction as to what code I should include in my .htaccess file to fix this problem.

    After I made this initial change, I lost my enter header section of my website and it also screwed up the rest of my page template.

    Thanks in advance for your help!

  4. julien ~

    Hi,

    i just would like to know one thing. if you combine using multiple subdomain to serve images and script, where would put your .htaccess file that hold the cache control header, future expire header and all this for images.

    do you put it in your main domain root or in the subdomains root where you have images and script?

    thanks

    julien

  5. Jeff ~

    Hello, when l add this to my .htaccess it crashes my site (returns 404) … any idea why?

    Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
  6. Pete ~

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

  7. 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/


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