Caching from URLs with a query string

Question

The web application I\'m working on serves up images with URLs like /image?name=a.gif. Pages are loading slowly partly because browsers are not caching the images.

I

Answer 1

Set the expires header in your web server to some far away date.

Answer 2

It's commonly thought that a lot of older browsers (including IE6) and some older versions of caches like Squid won't cache any file that has a querystring attached, regardless of the expires date.

The more robust alternative to querystring versioning is to put versioning information into the path, such as:

site/static/23212903/css/bundle.css

Or:

site/images/logo.r23212903.png

For more, here's a great article on setting cache headers correctly by Sergey Chernyshev.