Using Headers for Caching
One of my main goals while redoing my website is to optimize my content, both on the frontend and backend. The frontend is something that I've always considered to be the most important in terms of a fast user experience - I'm not crunching enough data on the backend to worry about long processing delays for users. However, depending on the connection, I've noticed delays upwards of five seconds in between pages, which is completely unacceptable.
There's a few things that a web developer can do to speed up the frontend. Decreasing the number and lowering the size of the unique elements are two of the most obvious. If the user only has to download two small stylesheets instead of five, your site will appear faster. What I wanted to do was take this a step further; repeat visitors will not have to download any new stylesheets, scripts, or images. The only http request will be the xHTML content. This can be handled by using the built in caching components of the internet.
There are several different ways that website can cache information ...
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