Forum Topic: Why is webpagetest.org showing an no max-age or expire alert for the domain?

Forum: .htaccess Forum : Basics • Posted by Ralf Koller • Updated:

I ran into something odd. So far i’ve thought the expires headers would be applied to file types. I’ve used a mix of snippets listed in the book on page 47 and 52. All works fine. The only failures and warnings i get are related to google chart api, google maps and google fonts. That’s fine but one thing puzzles me. I’ve checked the caching with webpagetest.org. But there is also listed the following:

FAILED - (No max-age or expires)

for the plain domain name of the site. No file type, nothing, just the domain name. Is that a regular behaviour? Noticed today for the first time. Has anybody else experienced that? Best regards Ralf

2 Replies to “Why is webpagetest.org showing an no max-age or …”

Posted by Jeff Starr •

I don’t know about anyone else, but that could be a result that is returned only by webpagetest.org. Have you tried testing with other online services to see what they report? It would be interesting to find out.

Posted by Ralf Koller •

hmmmm good idea! But when testing things out I get doubts how reliable those tests are. I’ve checked yslow now too. It tells me that the favicon.png in my wp theme is without a far-futue expiration date while in webpagetest.org it passed without a problem:

/wp-content/themes/activetheme/favicon.png

but in the htaccess the expiration date is set to 1 month into the future for png files

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"

Chrome Audit showed nothing expire header related and google page speed shows again 7 other files ( my css file, the two js files and the 5 images on the front-page – and for sure google apis files i am unable to control). But it seems each test shows other files not being cached properly. :/