by Wesley Luyten in Optimization on Nov 23, 2008
This is the third part of the article Speeding Up your Web Site. The method is really easy to configure and will drastically increase the speed of your web page. I found this optimizing tip at askapache.com:
Just put the following lines in your
Store the
A first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.
Just put the following lines in your
.htaccess file:<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>
Store the
.htaccess file in the directory from where you want to start adding the far future header, so if you store this in the root all the files on your server with the extensions above will get a far future expires header.
by Wesley Luyten in Optimization on Nov 23, 2008
Reducing the number of HTTP requests is the key to faster pages. As read in the best practices for speeding up your web site:
CSS Sprites is another way to reduce the number of requests but we wont be handling sprites in this article.
So combining of the javascript and CSS files, you can do this either by manually putting all the javascript files in one large file or let a script handle the combining for you. I think I'm gonna choose the latter. The combining script I use on this site is created by a dutch programmer called Rakaz and can be found at this link: Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files
This PHP script is awesome, it not only combines your files but also compresses it and stores a cache for instant response time. So just follow the guidelines at the page above and you'll be speeding up your web site in no time. For this site it made a noticeable difference and cut down the load time from 4.69 sec to 3.55 sec.
For Nucleus CMS users I have tweaked the script a little for ultimate usability, read on below.
80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages. Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet.
CSS Sprites is another way to reduce the number of requests but we wont be handling sprites in this article.
So combining of the javascript and CSS files, you can do this either by manually putting all the javascript files in one large file or let a script handle the combining for you. I think I'm gonna choose the latter. The combining script I use on this site is created by a dutch programmer called Rakaz and can be found at this link: Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files
This PHP script is awesome, it not only combines your files but also compresses it and stores a cache for instant response time. So just follow the guidelines at the page above and you'll be speeding up your web site in no time. For this site it made a noticeable difference and cut down the load time from 4.69 sec to 3.55 sec.
For Nucleus CMS users I have tweaked the script a little for ultimate usability, read on below.
by Wesley Luyten in Optimization on Nov 22, 2008
I have been wanting to write this article for quite a time now, and today I found the time to do it. First off I want to say I'm not an expert or something when it comes to optimizing websites but I try to do my best, and share my thoughts and findings with you guys. This article will explain how I reduced the load time of this nucleus website from approximately 8.28 sec to 1.74 sec. Why is this important, well because:
This website is served by the well known hosting service DreamHost. I have been very pleased with their services so far, they provide plenty web space and bandwidth for a blog (for sure) and their customer support is also awesome. The only lack is their servers aren't the fastest around especially when you make a lot of http requests and SQL queries, but hey what can you ask for such a low price.
Recent research shows that website users will not wait longer than 4 seconds for a website to load. After 4 seconds, customers will leave the site and seek an alternative site. Alarmingly, the research also shows that if a site fails to load within 4 seconds, users will be left with a negative brand perception.
This website is served by the well known hosting service DreamHost. I have been very pleased with their services so far, they provide plenty web space and bandwidth for a blog (for sure) and their customer support is also awesome. The only lack is their servers aren't the fastest around especially when you make a lot of http requests and SQL queries, but hey what can you ask for such a low price.
I am Wesley Luyten, on the net I'm also known as wessite. I am born and raised in Belgium, but I also have Canadian roots. I'm currently completing my master's degree in ICT engineering, and I'm pretty much web addicted :). I use a macbook pro to handle my computer business.