Caching Static Sites

An important part of creating a very fast website is setting up proper HTTP caching. HTTP caching allows browsers to cache resources from a website so that when the user returns to a site, very few parts of the website have to be downloaded.

Different types of resources are cached differently. Let’s examine how the different types of files built to public/ should be cached.

HTML

HTML files should never be cached. When you rebuild your Gatsby site, you often update the contents of HTML files. Because of this, browsers should be instructed to check on every request if they need to download a newer version of the HTML file.

The cache-control header should be cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate

Static files

All files in public/static/ should be cached forever. For files in this directory, Gatsby creates paths that are directly tied to the content of the file. Meaning that if the file content changes, then the file path changes also. These paths look weird e.g. reactnext-gatsby-performance.001-a3e9d70183ff294e097c4319d0f8cff6-0b1ba.png but since we know that we’ll always get the same file when we request that path, we can cache it forever.

The cache-control header should be cache-control: public,max-age=31536000,immutable

JavaScript and CSS

JavaScript and CSS files generated by webpack should also be cached forever. Like static files, Gatsby creates JS & CSS file names (as a hash!) based on the file content. If the file content is changed, the file hash will change, therefore these files generated by webpack are safe to cache.

The cache-control header should be cache-control: public, max-age=31536000,immutable

The only exception to this is the file /sw.js, which needs to be revalidated upon each load to check if a new version of the site is available. This file is generated by gatsby-plugin-offline and other service worker plugins, in order to serve content offline. Its cache-control header should be cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate

Setting up caching on different hosts

How you setup your caching depends on how you host your site. We encourage people to create Gatsby plugins per host to automate the creation of caching headers.

The following plugins have been created:

When deploying with Now, follow the instructions in the Now documentation.

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