To confirm that caching and compression are working as intended, open your browser’s developer tools and
inspect the Network tab while loading a representative page. Click on static assets—images, CSS, JS—and
review the Response Headers section. You should see Cache-Control with a
max-age that corresponds to your settings and, if using the feature, an
Expires header with a far‑future date. If you enabled the plugin’s Last‑Modified option,
look for a Last-Modified header as well. For Gzip or Brotli compression, check
Content-Encoding: values like gzip or br indicate compression is
active.
Use online tools such as webpagetest.org or developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to cross‑validate. Many hosting
dashboards and CDN panels also display effective headers and cache hit ratios. If headers are missing,
reconfirm that .htaccess is writable and that Apache modules mod_expires and
mod_headers are enabled. For Nginx or LiteSpeed, equivalent rules must be applied at the
server level.
Finally, test a second page view to observe the impact of browser caching. The “Size (Transferred)”
column should drop for cached resources, and timing should improve significantly. Validating with these
tools ensures your configuration is not only saved but actively influencing how browsers and
intermediaries cache your content.