This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Filename based asset cache busting

Description

Filename based cache busting for WordPress scripts/styles using last modified date.

Stop telling clients or users to hard refresh / shift refresh. The url to all of the css/js files on your site will change automatically whenever the files are modified. You can set proper long cache lifetimes to help get top scores on Google Pagespeed without running into cached css/javascript problems.

Based on this gist https://gist.github.com/ocean90/1966227 from Dominik Schilling, I’ve enhanced it by automatically replacing the asset version with the files modification time and automatically editing htaccess – making it install + forget.

Includes querystring option as a fallback – which works in more scenarios.

Webservers

Apache

The plugin should add what it needs to your .htaccess file jsut like WP itself. But if for any reason that doesn’t work for you – here’s what it adds:

# FBACB
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.+)\.([0-9\.]+)\.(js|css)$ $1.$3 [L]
</IfModule>

# still fbacb
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive on
    ExpiresByType text/css                            "access plus 1 year"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript              "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>
# END FBACB

NGINX

 location ~* ^(.+)\.(?:\d+)\.(min.js|min.css|js|css)($|\?.*$) {
   try_files $uri $1.$2;
 }

Host specific notes

Some webhosts need a bit of custom config to get the filename based urls working.

WP Engine

To work on WP-Engine, you’ll need the following redirect added via my.wpengine -> installname -> Redirect rules

 Source: ^(.+)\.([0-9\.]+)\.(js|css)$
 Dest: $1.$3
 Type: break (this is under advanced)

CloudWays

Just works.

Flywheel

Just works.

PHP Fallback

If your webserver is failing to serve assets using url rewriting, the plugin attempts to serve them itsef (ie: via PHP). Obviously this is slow/less than ideal in production (it’ll be much slower) – so you should configure your web server correctly to serve the files. If you see this HTTP header “FBACB-Php-Fallback: yes” on your assets, this applies to you.

Note that hosts are increasingly configured to serve css/js directly from disk and won’t fall back to PHP + WordPress error handling – this fallback then won’t work.

Reviews

June 27, 2019
I was looking for something like Laravel's Elixir Cache bursting solution and found this plugin. Works great. To use this in nginx, add below line inside the server block of your site's nginx configuration # Support for Filename-based asset cache busting Plugin location ~* \.(?:css|js)$ { if (!-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^/(.+)\.([0-9\.]+)\.(js|css)$ /$1.$3 break; } }
April 19, 2017
Thanks for making this, simple, easy use and powerful! it helps me lot.
April 3, 2017
If you run a site that users browser caching, and you should, you should also be using some kind of cache busting. This plugin make it easy.
Read all 5 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Filename based asset cache busting” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors