Can 301 and 301 http redirects be cached with an expires header?

Question

I've run a couple tests and cannot get either a 301 or 302 redirect to be cached. In my case I have a large number of avatar icons on a page which I want redirected to a gravatar and/or facebook icon and I want the redirect to be cached, preferably for a medium period say a week.

Example header:


HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:13:04 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/552e3422df95ab611ce0d8d5b5d66c67?s=50&d=identicon
Cache-Control: max-age=414000
Expires: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:13:04 GMT
Content-Length: 330
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

So is this possible and if so what am I doing wrong?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

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I understand you intention, but I doubt that browsers are caching 301 status responses (which is confirmed here). Reading your answer you have the HTML-content under your control. Why don't you just change the image-links inside your HTML-response? So instead working with 301 you already "migrate" the links inside the source-document and browser directly hits a 200 link.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

Community

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answered Nov 28 '10 at 14:22

manuel aldana

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FF and Chrome do, as noted in the comment you linked. – Daisy Leigh Brenecki Sep 19 '12 at 04:56
Confirming Adam's observation- they do. Good to keep in mind when debugging .htaccess rules... – andig Nov 06 '13 at 16:49
Of course they cache 301. That's the idea behind 301 (permanent!). In case of FF and Chrome unlimited that is. In case of Safari I think until browser re-start. – agoldev Mar 13 '18 at 18:02

Can 301 and 301 http redirects be cached with an expires header?

1 Answers1