How long do browsers cache

I have read and understand the Privacy Policy and I consent to communications from Pressidium. Copy this code to your clipboard. The offer is valid for annual plans for the first year , after which our standard 2 month discount will be applied. Yorgos Fountis 8 min read. What is the browser cache? Do you like this article? The Ajax technique, as we explained in our introductory article on Ajax has become popular as it allows us to update a part of the webpage content without having to refresh the page.

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When you visit a website for the first time, your browser has a conversation with the remote server that hosts the site. Your browser sends a request, and the server sends back one of the website's assets.

The page HTML is the first to download and it becomes the blueprint by which the site is constructed. As your browser reads the HTML code, it sends out more requests to the server to send more pieces of the page, mostly the static assets mentioned above. This process takes up bandwidth. Some Web pages will take a great deal of time to fully download and become functional because they have a lot of pieces or their assets are large. For instance, you may notice that when you first open a Web page, the text appears before the images.

That's because text is small and takes little time to download, whereas a high-quality image may take several seconds an eternity in computing time to populate.

Caching improves and speeds up browsing. Once you've downloaded an asset, it lives for a time on your machine. Retrieving files from your hard drive will always be faster than retrieving them from a remote server, no matter how fast your Internet connection. Take a typical ecommerce site. Certain assets, such as the logo, will appear on every page in the exact same location no matter where you are on the site.

The browser cache gets full because it has a pre-established size limit , which can also be changed to be larger. However, at some point, it reaches its maximum value and, to continue doing its job, it eliminates the items stored longer to make room for new ones and improve navigation performance.

A very common example of that problem is an error in which the user tries to log in to a CMS, such as WordPress , but the system does not comply, and the page always returns to the login screen. One of the causes of that failure may be cached files. Thus, it understands that the content is static, so it does not have the need to download it. It is recommended to clear the browser cache regularly or when you notice strange behavior on a page to avoid that problem. When cleaning and reaccessing the site, the browser will load the latest version of all static files.

Thus, new changes made on a website can be updated in the browser. You probably already filled out a landing page to download some interesting content and, after a few days, came back on the same page and realized that the information you filled in was still there.

Well, in addition to the static files of the sites, the browser also stores other important information for navigation, such as data from forms, cookies, browsing history, among others. Additionally it IS possible to return caching headers with s at least in Apache and Nginx and the RFC says that "use other header fields provided in the Not Modified response to replace all instances of the corresponding header fields in the stored response.

Could you please share how to send new caching information with a response in Apache? You don't need to do anything special. Once caching headers are set up they work for s in same way as s. For example go to www. Pick an asset which will e. That didn't answer my question. Yes you basically reapply the same caching. Say you've said "cache it for 3 hours" on the original request, then you visit after 4 hours and luckily it's still in the browser cache so you get a which then says the cached version is still up to date and now is valid again for another 3 hours.

Not sure why you feel it's necessary to provide completely new caching information on a response? Could you explain that for my understanding? Show 3 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog.

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