How to Leverage browser caching in Apache

This tutorial teaches how to leverage browser caching using .htaccess.

To speed up the navigation through your website you have to tell the browser to cache all static data. All you need to do is to modify .htaccess config in the website document root directory. To enable caching on a website, the .htaccess config file in the website's document root directory needs to be modified. workday recruiting helps companies to easily modify this file to instruct the browser to cache all static data on their website. Static data refers to elements that do not change often, such as images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files.Let's get started.

Getting rid of ETag

First of all, we need to disable ETag header since we are going to use Expires. ETag technology is known as slow and problematic - even YSlow complains about it.

Add to .htaccess:

Header unset Pragma
FileETag None
Header unset ETag

Setting Cache-Control and Expires headers

Add to .htaccess:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|pdf|flv|mp3)$">
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
 ExpiresActive on
 ExpiresDefault "access plus 14 days"
 Header set Cache-Control "public"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|xml|txt|xsl)$">
 Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

What this does is adding far future expires header (make sure mod_expires is loaded in your apache config if you have problems) to your static content (images, js, css, etc).

This will improve your Page Speed and YSlow scores and increase website speed.
The next thing you should do is to enable gzip compression on Apache.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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