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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#39649 How to remove the cache-control header in Akeeba backup extension ?

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.4
PHP version
8.1
Akeeba Backup version
9.8.1

Latest post by alainbadan on Wednesday, 18 October 2023 12:39 CDT

alainbadan

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Hello,

How to remove the cache-control header in Akeeba backup extension ?

Thank you.

Best regards,

Badan

 

tampe125
Akeeba Staff

Hello,

why you would do that? In which view would you like to remove such header?

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

alainbadan

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

Here is what my host, SiteGround, says:

  • Since the cache issue is caused by the Joomla functionality I highly recommend you contact your website's developer who can check your Akeeba Backup functionality and remove the cache-control header. Once your developer has done that, the dynamic cache should be working as expected for your Joomla application which will improve its performance and reduce its server resource usage.

 

Best regards,

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The Cache-Control header is added by Joomla itself on all backend and frontend pages. It's not something that each individual extension has the ability to change in its pages.

By default, Joomla adds headers to dissuade caching of its pages as it's supposed to generate dynamic content.

You cannot change that at all in the backend for the extremely obvious reason that backend pages must always be served fresh, not from cache, as their content changes all the time due to the administrative actions.

You can change that in the frontend of the site, by publishing the System - Page Cache plugin. This plugin sets the Cache-Control headers to tell caching proxies (like Varnish, what SiteGround is using but won't actually admit; they did tell me when I visited their HQ and asked them point blank if that's what they are using) and web browsers to cache the page for a period of time. Please note that this does come with a tradeoff: your frontend pages WILL NOT show any new content when you update your articles, modules, etc from the backend of the site until the page cache expires. Moreover, if you have dynamic, per-user elements on your pages such as Joomla's login module you might see the wrong information (Joomla! will of course not send headers to cache the page once a user is logged in, but since the URL is the same as the public page SiteGround's SueprCache, i.e. the Varnish proxy, will still serve the cached public page, not the page the user needs to see).

Further to that, as SiteGround already knows, Akeeba Backup DOES NOT run on the frontend of your site, therefore it cannot affect your site's frontend performance. As SiteGround already knows, Akeeba Backup has NOTHING to do with caching headers at all anyway; it's a backup component, not an SEO or site caching component.

Maybe you should consider moving your site to an actually competent host. SiteGround seems to have put a lot of completely untrained help desk agents answering tickets, or you are the unluckiest person in the world to have your tickets replied to by all the help desk agents who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

alainbadan

Thank you for your insights.

I should point out that I am a happy customer of Akeeba backup for many, many years.

Best regards

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