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Asked: 2026-06-06T12:02:16+00:00

I discovered https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ the other day and have improved my website’s page speed from

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I discovered https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ the other day and have improved my website’s page speed from ~75 to ~95 now.

One of the last few things it recommends is that I:

Leverage browser caching: Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers
for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources 
from local disk rather than over the network.

The cache time for my main javascript and css files is set to 2 days, Google suggests I set it to at least 1 week. They also suggest that I do the same for html and php files.

What would happen to my users if I decided to make a large website change and they had just cached my website yesterday (for 1 week)? Would they not see the changes on my website until 1 week later?

Also, since my website contains a control panel and has some dynamically generated PHP pages, is there any reason for caching any of it? Wouldn’t my server still be churning through php script and generating new content every time they logged into their account?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You probably doesn’t want to cache your HTML and PHP in visitors browsers. However you might want to cache that in a layer you have more control over, like PHP opcode caching with APC and a reverse proxy like Varnish.

    For the static assets, like your JavaScript and CSS files, it should be safe to cache them a year or more. If you make a change to them you can just update their URL to say mystyles.css?v=123 and browsers will think it’s a whole different file from mystyles.css?v=122 or even just mystyles.css.

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