Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control

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Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control

Caching with .htaccess and Apache will take your website and your web skills to the next level. This is some technical and advanced methods condensed to simple htaccess code examples for you. But you must take the time to understand caching with cache-control and other headers and HTTP options before you implement on a production server.

More detailed article: Speed Up Sites with htaccess Caching.

NOTE: Stay tuned I’m working on the update!

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Easy Apache Speed Tips Articles

Caching with both mod_expires + mod_headers

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
 
# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">
ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>
 
# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">
ExpiresDefault A604800
Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>
 
# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt|html|js|css)$">
ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
 
# Force no caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch "\.(php|cgi|pl|htm)$">
ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

Caching with mod_headers

# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
</FilesMatch>
 
# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>
 
# 3 HOUR
<FilesMatch "\.(txt|xml|js|css)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=10800"
</FilesMatch>
 
# NEVER CACHE
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php|cgi|pl)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, private, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

Caching with mod_expires

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
 
# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">
ExpiresDefault A9030400
</FilesMatch>
 
# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
ExpiresDefault A604800
</FilesMatch>
 
# 3 HOUR
<FilesMatch "\.(txt|xml|js|css)$">
ExpiresDefault A10800"
</FilesMatch>

Other Speed Tips

To truly speed up your site, you will want to implement a server-side caching technique. Or you can read more about caching and web cache.

Apache Caching Guide

This document supplements the <a href="http://askapache.info/trunk/mod/mod_cache.html" title="Apache mod_cache">mod_cache</a>, <a href="http://askapache.info/trunk/mod/mod_disk_cache.html" title="Apache mod_disk_cache">mod_disk_cache</a>, <a href="http://askapache.info/trunk/mod/mod_mem_cache.html" title="Apache mod_mem_cache">mod_mem_cache</a>, <a href="http://askapache.info/trunk/mod/mod_file_cache.html" title="Apache mod_file_cache">mod_file_cache</a> and htcacheclean reference documentation.

It describes how to use Apache’s caching features to accelerate web and proxy serving, while avoiding common problems and misconfigurations.

htaccess time cheatsheet

#      300   5 MIN
#      600  10 MIN
#      900  15 MIN
#     1800  30 MIN
#     2700  45 MIN
#     3600   1 HR
#     7200   2 HR
#    10800   3 HR
#    14400   4 HR
#    18000   5 HR
#    36000  10 HR
#    39600  11 HR
#    43200  12 HR
#    46800  13 HR
#    50400  14 HR
#    54000  15 HR
#    86400   1 DAY
#   172800   2 DAY
#   259200   3 DAY
#   345600   4 DAY
#   432000   5 DAY
#   518400   6 DAY
#   604800   1 WEEK
#  1209600   2 WEEK
#  1814400   3 WEEK
#  2419200   4 WEEK
#  4838400   2 MONTH
#  7257600   3 MONTH
#  9676800   4 MONTH
# 12096000   5 MONTH
# 14515200   6 MONTH
# 16934400   7 MONTH
# 19353600   8 MONTH
# 21772800   9 MONTH
# 24192000  10 MONTH
# 26611200  11 MONTH
# 29030400  12 MONTH

htaccess Guide Sections

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Add Your Opinion

Reader Comments

  1. fara ~

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

  2. Frank ~

    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

  3. Erik Bauffman ~

    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 ?

  4. Jason ~

    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!

  5. Daniel ~

    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.


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