HTTP header function and Optimize Caching

Report · Jun 30, 2011

Hello,

Google Labs has a product out there called page speed that was recommended by in theWebmaster Tools Technical Guidelines. The product allows you to submit your URL and then it gives you feedback on what can be done to improve the site. One of the feed back suggestions, I got, recommended that I optimize my caching on all my static resources, such as images(.jpg) and style sheets(.css)

Here is a sample below. The url entered was http://www.aimeecaprice.com/

Suggestions for this page

The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime. Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the following resources:

http://www.aimeecaprice.com/images/small/black_tote15.JPG (expiration not specified)
http://www.aimeecaprice.com/images/small/logo.jpg (expiration not specified)
http://www.aimeecaprice.com/.../newjewelryheading.JPG (expiration not specified)

Now here is my problem, I read the documentation and it talks about setting the expiry dates or the max-age in the HTTP headers. I honestly don't know where in my code, these HTTP headers are suppose to be or what they are suppose to look like.Or where to place them. They are not talking about meta tags. Or setting caching with the meta tags This is something different. and I just can't visualize how it is suppose to look like with the rest of my code. Does anybody use this and can you send me a coupleof simple samples that address image and css resources?

Thanks

Oh one more thing, I thing I am supposed to do this for each .jpg but I don't know how to specify each .jpg. I

Thanks so much for all the help

Sincerely,

aimeecaprice

Report · Jun 30, 2011

Aimee, they are most likely talking about cache-control, or expires http headers that you set at the server level, not in the web page ( although you can do that with server side scripting). Read this tutorial to understand caching a little better - and look at the implementation sections:

http://www.web-caching.com/mnot_tutorial/