1) your pages may all contain query strings '?' and are blocked from caching by hierarchy_stoplist. ** removing that directive is safe in Squid-3.x. Care is needed in squid-2.x if using siblings (which you are not). How do I remove this? Where is this setting? 2a) Apache may be sending out headers to prevent caching. use the tool at http://redbot.org on some of the URL which you believe should cache. 2b) the client software may be sending such headers. There were some versions of chrome which were known to send no-cache on every single request. We are using FireFox to test and pressing F5 But then we are using server side caching so such headers should be ignored by Squid 3) all your objects maybe >4MB and being blocked by the max object limit. All images are much less than this size