Enabling Expiration/Cache in IIS7

Adding "expiration header" into your static files help the browser to cache those files - therefore reducing the payload in the network in which then increase the performance perceived by user. Both YSlow and PageSpeed highly recommend this approach in their high performance website articles.

You can do this programatically, this post is about enabling this in IIS7 - which is pretty easy.

1. Open IIS Manager
2. Navigate using the tree-view on the left pane to the folder where your static files are located. In most cases these are your static html, image, css, and javascript files. For example, I put all my images in 1 folder called "images" - so I highlighted that folder and on the right pane, in the "Feature View", double click on "HTTP Response Header".
3. Under "Actions" - located top right, click "Set Common Headers"
4. Check "Expire Web Content" checkbox and specify how long you want the files to be cache. I usually set this to 30 days. Or you set a particular date & time too if you want. Hit "OK". Do the same thing for all the folders whose files you want to cache.
5. That's it! Now if you browse your site and look using YSlow or Fiddler or PageSpeed, you will see that the files under the folders are cache by the browser and not retrieved from the server every time.