How do I "leverage browser caching"

[brianw10]

Google is telling me to "leverage browser caching" and put a freshness factor of 1 week on images used on my site. http://www.1stclassdriving.co.uk.
Try as i may I cannot find out how to do this.

I'm running two sites -  http://www.1stclassdriving.co.uk. on a shared hosting package with Easyspace and http://www.croydondrivingschool.co.uk with Fasthosts, both under windows with asp scripting.

Can anyone point me to any tutorials or guide me as to how I do this please

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Brian

I think you might find this helpful - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6634302/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-at-asp-net-iis-7-5

and...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/642954/iis7-cache-control

You should be able to do this by making/editing (if you already have one) a web.config file in your root folder, which is explained in the article above.

[brianw10]

Brilliant - works fine - many thanx Matt

[Matt-Williamson]

Glad I could help Brian and welcome to the community, by the way

[BeytzNet]

Dear Matt,

I don't get it...

Is the answer in the programming of the site (for example through the web.config) or something to do in the IIS (which means the hosting company should do it...?) ?

Also, caching only helps the second time the same user loads the page doesn't it?

THanks

[Matt-Williamson]

This post is deleted!

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

To Leverage browser caching speeds up your site as it will only cause common resources to be loaded once rather than every time you load a page on your site or revisit the site. In order to leverage browser caching I would suggest editing your web.config file if you are on an IIS server or in the .htaccess file if you are on an Apache server. Both of these will involve you making an entry into either of these files and shouldn't require your hosting company. I regularly work with both, but in particular Apache servers and I often drop the standard code in to leverage this and speed the site up. One other noticeable speed enhancement I would recommend is gzip compression which can be carried out in a similar manner. If you have anymore questions about any of this don't hesitate to give me a shout on here