Add Expires headers to Azure Hosted wordpress

Question

Using Azure Hosted WordPress, I was doing some performance testing for my website via gtmetrix. My reports were suggesting to ‘leverage browser caching’ and ‘add expires headers’ to improve my performance grading.

So Even after updating .htaccess it wasn't getting updated, I noticed that it wasn’t making any difference to my performance reports – which got me thinking about Azure and that it would be running IIS in the backend and not Apache – and of course IIS doesn’t use the .htaccess file, it uses web.config instead.

So how do I Add Expires headers ??

Answer 1

IIS supports header expires, simply add them to your web.config file.

Examples:

SOURCE

<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
         <clientCache cacheControlMode="UseExpires"
            httpExpires="Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT" />
      </staticContent>
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

 

SOURCE

From .NET Daily, I successfully applied this to a PHP site on IIS. It sets the max age to 30 days from now, rather than having to specify an explicit date.

Add this to your web.config file:

<system.webServer>
  <staticContent>
    <clientCache cacheControlMaxAge="30.00:00:00" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge"/>
  </staticContent>
</system.webServer>

This configuration satisfies both PageSpeed "Leverage browser caching" and YSlow "Add Expires headers". YSlow requires a value greater than 7 days. PageSpeed requires between 30 days and 1 year.