Why Caching Files is Important
Website speed is essential. It affects so much when it comes to how your site performs. Your site will load faster, so you will impress visitors and they’ll be happy. No one wants to wait for a site to load. Every second feels like an eternity. Also, page speed affects your page rank as well. This is essential if you want tons of visitors via search results. (Trust me, you do.) One of the easiest ways to crush load times is to cache files. This means that a server or a CDN stores files or parts of your site, so they don’t have to load each time. This is especially useful when there are no changes to part of a site, like your website’s header image, or certain images. Below, you’ll learn how to cache files on your site.
Caching Files via .htaccess
<FilesMatch ".(flv|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|swf|js|css|pdf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000"
This means that these files will be cached, which is good because they most likely won’t change. You specify the time using max-age, which tells the site the time in seconds before the cache updates.
A CDN Can Really Help
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network can really help to speed up your site. I personally like Cloudflare, because it makes caching easy. You can determine different levels of caching, which I always use aggressive. You can also specify the minimum expire TTL, which determines how long Cloudflare caches remain on visitors computers.
Caching files is extremely important to making your site load extremely fast. The faster your site lads, the better. Also, services like Cloudflare have extra add-ons and features that help your site o load fast as well. For example, Cloudflare will auto minify CSS and all javascript files. This can be a big help, too.
What do you think? Do you have any tips or questions for caching files? If so, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below.