Our images and scripts are on the Amazon Cloudfront.
We’ve defined an expire header on each file – yet we’re
still seeing a low score in this category.
growth trac dot com
The headers are set to:
“EXPIRES” CONTENT="Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT
It looks like pagetest doesn’t consider a bunch of your content “static” so it isn’t counting a lot of the requests in the grade (look at the actual checklist).
The binary/octet-stream mime type is messing up pagetest because it only looks for images and text mime types to be static. I can look at extending that in the next release (probably in the next couple of days). Even your ccss and js get the wrong mime type :-/
I don’t know that it is critical to clear up - the browsers apparently don’t care that the mime type doesn’t match the content but it’s probably something you should be aware of.
If you click on the checklist thumbnail and then scroll down below the checklist it will give you details about everything that failed. I don’t think you’re caching as well as you think you are:
It still has the problem where it isn’t counting your content served from cloudfront because of the mime types though.
Combine CSS and JS isn’t about minifying, it is about reducing the number of separate js and css files that are loaded in the head. You should only have one of each with all of the code merged into a single file. In this case your situation is worse than the tool is identifying because of the mime type issue with your setup. Looks like you have at least 8 separate css files and 12 js files. The js is particularly bad because with IE7 (and Firefox < 3.6) the browser “blocks” on javascript files and doesn’t download anything else when it is downloading a script file. If at all possible you should move as much code as possible to the bottom of the file instead of loading it in the head because anything you load in the head needs to be loaded before the browser will display anything (causing long “start render” ttimes).