Software Development:
Individual Programming

Symptom

You want to use browser caching for your static files like JavaScript .js, JPEG, GIF, and PNG images .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, Icons .ico and cascaced style sheets .css.

Cause

Browser caching stores files that are change seldomly in the browser cache for a long time. These files will not be loaded from the server again if a user repeatedly visits the homepage, but they will be loaded from the browser cache. For the browser to know how long it shall store the static files in its cache, the server must send an “expires” header with the files.

Solution

At Bitpalace, static files like images, JavaScript files, icons and CSS files are handled by the Nginx reverse proxy that runs as a frontend to your Apache web server. Requests of these file types never reach Apache. They ease the server load and speed-up delivery of the static files to the browser dramatically. Nginx does not only need less system resources and processes data much faster than Apache, it caches the files in a server-side cache, too. This is one of the reasons for the high server speed that your website has with a Bitpalace hosting plan. If had previously tried to add an “expires” header by an .htaccess file, you were unsuccessful, because an .htaccess file only controls what the Apache web server gets to see.

By default, Nginx does not send an „expires“ header, because for many customers it is not desirable to keep static files in the browser cache for a long while. For Nginx to send an “expires” header, a configuration directive like this needs to be added to the Nginx server configuration:

location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {
expires 365d;
}

In this example, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .gif, .ico, .css and .js files would be stored in the users’s browser for 365 days and would not be downloaded from the server on return visits . This makes a website even faster and reduces the server load further, because the download of the files is omitted.

The procedure has a disadvantage, too: If file contents of static files change, users will not see the changes, because their browser will not download the latest version from the server until the file that was once downloaded and stored in the browser cache is older than 365 days.

You cannot configure the setting yourself, because the Nginx reverse proxy is administrated by the server admininstration. Our support be happy to add an “expires” header for you. We recommend to use the default as shown above, but you can have your own file extensions and expires value, too. Please simply send an e-mail to support, if you want this special configuration.

Overview of frequently asked questions