HTTP headers that make your website go faster

Imagine serving content instantly while fetching a fresh version in the background. Discover how modern caching headers can eliminate wait times for your users.

#1about 5 minutes

Why reverse caching proxies are essential for performance

A reverse caching proxy sits between users and your origin server to protect it from overload and accelerate content delivery.

#2about 5 minutes

Understanding the basic Cache-Control header directives

The Cache-Control header uses directives like public, private, and max-age to define caching scope and duration for browsers and shared caches.

#3about 2 minutes

Using s-maxage to set different cache durations

The s-maxage directive allows you to set a specific time-to-live (TTL) for shared caches, which overrides the general max-age directive.

#4about 5 minutes

Optimizing revalidation with conditional requests

Use ETag and Last-Modified headers to enable conditional requests, allowing servers to respond with a 304 Not Modified to save bandwidth and resources.

#5about 3 minutes

Improving resilience by serving stale content

The stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error directives allow caches to serve stale content while revalidating in the background or during origin failures.

#6about 3 minutes

Controlling strictness and preventing caching

Use directives like must-revalidate, no-cache, and no-store to enforce strict content freshness or prevent caching altogether for sensitive data.

#7about 2 minutes

Using the Vary header for content negotiation

The Vary header instructs caches to store different versions of a resource based on request headers like Accept-Language, enabling content negotiation.

#8about 2 minutes