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How do we control web page caching, across all browsers?

Revati S Misra 192 27-Apr-2023

How do we control web page caching, across all browsers?

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Updated on 27-Apr-2023
Revati S Misra

Revati S Misra

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Skilled in SEO, content writing, and digital marketing. Completed several years of working in many organizations including multinational companies. I love to learn new things in life that keep me motivated.

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Aryan Kumar

Aryan Kumar

27-Apr-2023

Controlling web page caching across all browsers can be challenging, as different browsers handle caching differently. However, there are a few HTTP response headers that you can use to control web page caching in most browsers, including:

  1. Cache-Control: The Cache-Control header allows you to control how long a browser should cache a resource. It includes directives such as "no-cache", "no-store", "public", "private", "max-age", and "s-maxage". For example, setting "Cache-Control: no-cache" will instruct the browser to always revalidate the resource with the server before displaying it, while setting "Cache-Control: max-age=3600" will instruct the browser to cache the resource for one hour.
  2. Expires: The Expires header allows you to set a specific expiration time for a resource, in the form of an absolute date and time. For example, setting "Expires: Wed, 21 Oct 2025 07:28:00 GMT" will instruct the browser to cache the resource until that specific date and time.
  3. ETag: The ETag header provides a way for the server to identify a specific version of a resource, allowing the browser to cache the resource more efficiently. The ETag value is typically a hash of the resource content, and the browser can use it to check if the resource has changed since the last time it was cached.

Here is an example of how you can set these headers in an HTTP response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
ETag: “abc123”

In this example, we are setting the Cache-Control header to "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" to ensure that the browser always revalidates the resource with the server. We are also setting the Expires header to "0" and the Pragma header to "no-cache" for compatibility with older web browsers. Finally, we are setting the ETag header to "abc123" to help the browser cache the resource more efficiently.

Note that setting caching headers can have a significant impact on the performance of your web pages, so it's important to test and optimize your caching strategy for your specific use case.

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