Query string URLs are not cached

Wow. Awesome support on this.

Hey… I just posted effectively the same thing (https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/caching-pages-with-get-querystrings) and saw that you just posted a few hours ago.

Hopefully my post contains more details and someone will decide to take a look (or I do, just when I get some free time).

Urls with query strings get legacy caching or php caching, which is different. They cannot be cached as plain html files.

The way mod_rewrite caching works is that .htaccess completely bypasses wordpress or php or mysql, which is why it’s super fact and efficient. However, if .htaccess does not find the .html (or .html.gz) file to ‘redirect’ the user to, it moves on to direct the user to WordPress, where WPSC will serve the requested page via its php or legacy cache. This means php/mysql are in play.

If you want a fast and reliable service, don’t use query strings. Use rewrite rules (permalinks) and custom variables to “flatten” your urls – especially on very busy pages.

I *don’t* use query strings. But I can’t control other sites that use query strings to link to my site, which stresses my server since WP Supercache doesn’t cache those.

But in that case query strings shouldn’t affect your caching, if I’m not mistaken.

https://www.example.com/some-page/ and https://www.example.com/some-page/?some=query will return the same page (the first) from wpsc.

Look at your page source for both – you should see at the bottom the same wpsc footprint.

Nope, that doesn’t cache, believe me.

Any link I could look at? the response headers sometimes shed some light.

I’ll have to find one, but I will post it here. It’s late, calling it a night.