When a web browser displays your webpage it has to load several things like logos, images, css files, js files, etc. You can use leverage browser caching to remember the resources that the browser has already accessed. It is one of the website optimizations that we can do in our websites to get good performance.
We can reduce the number of HTTP requests that the server needs to process by caching. This will reduce the time taken to load the site and hence website performance improved. We can achieve this by adding Expires headers to our .htaccess. This will also help you improve the performance of your website, based on Google’s and Yahoo’s recommended performance guidelines.
Browser caching can help by storing some of these files locally in the user’s browser. Their first visit to your site will take the same time to load, however when that user revisits your website, refreshes the page, or even moves to a different page of your site, they already have some of the files they need locally. This means the amount of data the user’s browser has to download is less and fewer requests need to be made to your server. It will decrease the page load times.
Adding Expires headers in htaccess
We can achieve browser caching by adding Expires headers in the htaccess file. If your website has returning visitors, this will reduce the number of HTTP requests by caching the contents of your site like images: jpg, gif, png, favicon/ico, javascript, and CSS.
When someone visits your site, their browser will fetch all your images, CSS files, javascript files, etc. If Leverage browser caching is not enabled, when the same visitor views your site again and again, these contents are fetched repeatedly. By Expires headers you tell your website, visitors a browser that the file types you specified via .htaccess are not changing until after a certain time, for example, a month. By doing this, the browser does not want to download the images, CSS, and javascript files repeatedly. The browser can cache the contents until their expiry date, so repeated visits do not take much time and will not make as many HTTP requests as took in the first time visit.
If cached, the document may be fetched from the cache rather than from the source until the expiry time has passed. After that, the cache copy is considered expired and invalid, and a new copy must be obtained from the source.
Website Performance Testing Tools
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You can check your site’s performance by using the following online tools.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ http://gtmetrix.com/
Generate .htaccess to Leverage browser caching
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In order to generate the htaccess entries for fixing the Leverage browser caching, it is needed to identify all types of files contained in your site. You can find these types from the Leverage browser caching section in the performance testing result of your website discussed in the above section.
Let you have the following type of files,
images: jpg, gif, png
favicon/ico
javascript
CSS
You need to also determine how often, you are changing the files on your site(These are the expiry of those contents), the following expiry options are available in this case.
years
months
weeks
days
hours
minutes
seconds
Expires header for your favicon
The files like favicon are rarely changed, so you can give a long time for a favicon. Here we can use the following entry for the favicon, it is specified that the favicon file expires only after 1 year. The following entry instructs your browser to cache the contents for 1 year from the day of the first visit. If your website visitor clears the browser cache, it will re-fetch the resources again.
ExpiresByType image/x-icon access plus 1 year
Expires header for the images
If you are updating the images in your sites frequently, like every week you can set the entry as follows. The following entry instructs your browser to cache the contents for 1 week from the day of the first visit. If your website visitor clears the browser cache, it will re-fetch the resources again. If is changing every week, you can change it accordingly.
ExpiresByType image/gif access plus 1 week ExpiresByType image/png access plus 1 week ExpiresByType image/jpg access plus 1 week ExpiresByType image/jpeg access plus 1 week
Expires header for your CSS
The following entry instructs your browser to cache the CSS contents for 1 month from the day of the first visit. If your website visitor clears the browser cache, it will re-fetch the resources again. If is changing every week, you can change it accordingly.
ExpiresByType text/css access plus 1 month
Expires header for your javascript
The following entry instructs your browser to cache javascript contents for 1 year from the day of the first visit. If your website visitor clears the browser cache, it will re-fetch the resources again. If is changing every week, you can change it accordingly.
ExpiresByType application/javascript access plus 1 year
You can combine all of the settings in a single. In the following htaccess file, there is different kind of files with different expiry settings. Change the following htaccess file depending on the contents of your website.
####################################################### <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive on ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType text/xml "access plus 0 seconds" ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year ExpiresByType image/ico "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType video/webm "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 14 days" ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 0 seconds" ExpiresByType application/json "access plus 0 seconds" ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour" ExpiresByType application/atom+xml "access plus 1 hour" </IfModule> #######################################################
Once you add these lines in the htaccess file, you can test the performance of your site again in the tools discussed above. You can find that the recommended fixing of Leverage browser caching is passed.
