Best practice to prevent browsers from loading contents from cache

[pideluxe]

What is you best practice for preventing web browsers from loading contents of newly generated or static sites from their cache, so that the visitor always gets the newest version? I tried the following, but not with the desired results:

• Meta-Tag "expires" with date in the past
• .htaccess-method described here (german)

Any suggestions?

[pwired]

Try this:

<?php
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
?>

Or this with sunday as example:

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Sun, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT"/>
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

header('Expires: Sun, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT');
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0', FALSE);
header('Pragma: no-cache');

You can also do random Generated Numbers on the files you dont want to be cached.

[isellsoap]

I think this Stack Overflow question + the answers is exactly what you need.

In general, file versioning is definitely the way to go. It depends how your build process is though. Personally I use gulp with the gulp-rev package. There’s a pretty neat integration guide in the GitHub repo.