browser caching not disabled after disabling in .htaccess

by

After struggling with the issue for several days here are the steps that I took to finally overcome the problem:

  1. Reset the .htaccess to default values(no luck)
  2. Add above values to .htaccess in order to disable leverage browser caching(no luck)
  3. Contacted my hosting provider and asked them to disable any potential caching policy on my host(which they replied there are none!)
  4. Changed index.php of wordpress to a simple php welcome page in order to determine if it’s a server side problem or wordpress problem
  5. Cleared the cache of browser and reload the page. Changes were immediately applied!!!
  6. Changed index.php to its default wordpress content. Reloaded the page, changes were applied, made another change in the content of the wordpress, Reloaded, and Bingo! No changes were applied. So it was obvious that something in wordpress was messing with the browser cache. So here is what I did:
  7. Disabled all the plugins, cleared the browser cache, everything worked perfectly fine. So there is a problem with one of the plugins.
  8. Enabled the plugins one by one and re-Run the test.
  9. And finally detected the plugin that was failing the whole thing. It is called “PWA for WP” and it is used for turning the website to a web app for mobile. In its settings there were several options for caching html and css and js files. After setting all of the expire times to Zero, everything is working fine!

The problem was that, the plugin was overriding the browser caching settings and even though we disabled the caching in the htaccess, the plugin re-Enabled it again.

So here is the journey I took to overcome this stupid and annoying problem. I shared the steps one-by-one in case it helps someone in the future. Hope it will be useful. Thanks for all the comments.

EDIT:

MrWhite:

but as you can see from the HTTP response headers, the “plugin” was
not re-enabling the conventional “browser cache”. But this was most
probably responsive for the “service worker” – JavaScript that runs in
the browser than is responsible for caching its own content (outside
of the normal browser cache) typically for “offline” viewing (eg. for
PWAs).