Hi,

I am designing a website and learning everything as I go. I host with justhost.com, and create html docs which I upload onto the server. My website is updated regularly, and I want to be able to control the cacheing. I have found many websites that talk about HTTP Headers and how to use them to control cacheing, but I haven't found anything that explains how to actually make or change the HTTP Headers on my site in language that I can understand. I would greatly appreciate any insight.

Thank you, Layla

If I need to post this in a different forum, please let me know.

With HTML your only choice is using meta elements.

The http-equiv is the attribute to set which header you are using.

So for cacheing :

<meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="value">

and the possible values are:

• Public - may be cached in public shared caches
• Private - may only be cached in private cache
• no-Cache - may not be cached
• no-Store - may be cached but not archived

Right now I am using the following meta tags:

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">

They are not doing the job adequately, and I have read in several places that meta tags are not reliable for controlling cacheing.

Will the tag you suggested work any differently or better than the ones I am already using?

Are there any other ways besides with HTML that I can use to modify the actual HTTP Headers?

Thank you.

The cache control headers are NOT intended for controlling browsers or search engines. Their use is for controlling the caching of proxy servers.


HTTP headers can be manipulated directly on the server, if you have access or server side code can be used to send HTTP headers and responses.

I don't know if I have access to the server, or if I do I don't know how I would go about doing so.

Can you give me an idea of how I might access my server to adjust the HTTP Headers.

Thanks again.

Given that you are with one of the mass resellers I think we can say pretty conclusively that your chances of being granted such access is somewhere between zero and none.

It is also unlikely that you have a server side code to work with, so metas and http-equiv is probably your limit.

If you are thinking from the point of view of SEO then H1 tag is the better and you can definitely go with it.

Originally Posted by chris.klinton

If you are thinking from the point of view of SEO then H1 tag is the better and you can definitely go with it.

Hn elements are HEADINGS NOT headers!!

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Hn elements are HEADINGS NOT headers!!

Off with the head(er|ing) !
;D

I am not thinking in SEO. I recently found out how to control HTTP Headers in the .htaccess file on my server. I added some cache-control headers and at first it seemed to force a refresh when there had been a change, but then, just today, I made small changes on three different pages, and two of them refreshed and one didn't. The header control I used is:

# cache images for 3 month
<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|swf|ico)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7257600, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# cache everything else for 1 week
<FilesMatch ".(js|css|pdf|txt|html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# disable caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch ".(pl|php|cgi|spl|scgi|fcgi)$">
Header unset Cache-Control
</FilesMatch>

Why didn't this work? What could I change to make it force a refresh when there have been changes, but allow it to use the cache if there haven't been changes?

Thanks

Could you provide a page where those headers should be set ?
I want to inspect them with a header sniffer, because you can have some things that interfere with them.
Namely: ETags.

Could you provide a page where those headers should be set ?
I want to inspect them with a header sniffer, because you can have some things that interfere with them.
Namely: ETags.

This is the header response on one of the pages on my site:

Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:05:52 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:30:22 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 22203
Cache-Control: max-age=604800, must-revalidate
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

604800 = 1 week in seconds