[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] W3TC: Don't cache front page & page expiry time

Through trial and error and “going back to Apache school”, I figured out the code required in the “never cache the following pages” settings box to not cache the home page when a site’s blog page (is_home_page) and front page (is_front_page) are different is:

^/$

FYI, it’s in the Apache mod_rewrite documentation at the end of the RewriteCond section.

I still hope someone can give me an answer on the garbage collection question…

And now I understand cache duration for pages, etc. It’s driven by the cache control policy and header lifetime. Cache control policy set to “cache with max-age” and expires header set to 300 seconds does exactly what I was seeking…sets browser cache to 300 second duration and page cache to 300 second duration.

You can disable the cache home page option on the page cache settings tab.

Thanks for responding Frederick. I recognize that and maybe I need to clarify my question and correct “is_home_page” syntax to “is_home”.

I use WordPress as a CMS for some sites and the homepage is a static page instead of a posts page. For those sites, the homepage is “is_front_page”, but it is not “is_home”…see https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/is_front_page.

I assume W3TC provides a direct to “is_home” (i.e., the posts page) in the page caching option that prevents homepage caching, but I need it to provide a direct for “is_front_page”. Using “^/$” in the “never cache the following pages” box resolves the problem and a static homepage is not cached.