Cache-Control HTTP header

Useful directives and what they mean:

• max-age=[seconds]: specifies the maximum amount of time that a resource will be considered fresh.
• s-maxage=[seconds]: similar to max-age, but only applies to shared caches.
• public: marks authenticated responses as cacheable. Often redundant as other directives (e.g., max-age) imply that caches may store a copy.
• private: allows only the end recipient of the response (e.g., the browser) to store a copy of it.
• no-store: instructs caches not to keep a copy of the resource under any conditions.
• no-cache: does not mean ‘no cache’. Will always revalidate with the server, and if there is no new content (304), the cached resource can be retrieved; otherwise, a fresh copy will be downloaded.
• must-revalidate: like no-cache, but with a grace period. Needs an associated max-age directive; e.g., Cache-Control: must-revalidate, max-age=600.
• proxy-revalidate: similiar to must-revalidate, but only applies to shared caches.
• stale-while-revalidate: provides a grace period for which the recipient can use an out-of-date resource while checking for a new version. E.g., Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, stale-while-revalidate=86400.
• immutable: a way of telling the recipient that a file will never change and to never bother revalidating it. It completely cuts out the overhead of a roundtrip of latency. To be used with care.