Expires headers do not work

Question

I tried a couple of approaches to get images and other resources to have an expiration date, but none seem to work accourding to http://www.webpagetest.org/

I also installed W3 plugin, still the tool reports the images do not have expires headers set.

I also included the following code in my htaccess:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A300
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A3600
ExpiresByType text/css A3600
ExpiresByType image/gif A3600
ExpiresByType image/png A3600
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A3600
ExpiresByType text/plain A300
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A3600
ExpiresByType video/x-flv A3600
ExpiresByType application/pdf A3600
ExpiresByType text/html A300
</IfModule>
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

This seems to be a common problem, and I have seen many questions about this, but couldn't find an answer.

Is the problem in the testing tool or on my server? How can I find out?

Answer 1

I had the same kind of problem. It seems (some) validators, like YSlow, don't succeed until the expires dates are on value 31536000.

Here's a full W3 Total Cache htaccess: http://pastebin.com/wegK3jD6.
It worked for me, you might as well give it a shot.

Note that the pastebin doesn't contain the WordPress htaccess content

Answer 2

The answer for me was enable expires module.

a2enmod expires
systemctl restart apache2

Answer by: Southparkfan in https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-setup-expire-headers-on-apache

So this code will work in apache server conf

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive on
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 15 days"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 months"
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 months"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 months"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 months"
    ExpiresByType text/js "access plus 1 months"
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 months"

    ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType font/ttf "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType font/otf "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType font/woff "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType font/woff2 "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

Hope that helps