Here's a basic guide to making your website run a bit quicker. It's good for SEO after all.
If you're going to try this, you'll need the following:
Page Speed
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
ySlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool.
I've assumed you've got Firefox (even if it's not your default browser) and that you've got Firebug as they're pretty much standard web development tools.
I then proceeded to run a Page Speed test on this site - it got 80 out of 100 and a C on ySlow. This annoyed me slightly - I mean, it's black text on a white page! Hardly intensive stuff. I then proceeded to lose hours of my life improving these scores. Some of the things I did were complete overkill, some were simple things which all sites could and should do. All are listed below....
First things first
I minified my CSS and Javascript files, as well as compressing them. This means fewer trips to the server and less wasted kilobytes in the file. I used a handy plugin which you can find here. Dead easy to use, so I'm not going to go into the details. These was a 31% reduction in the file sizes.
Page Speed - 83/100
Smush the images
Using the ySlow link (it's on the Tools tab in ySlow), I optimised my images (even though there was only a few to do). Even though I'd "Saved For Web" with decent settings in Photoshop, I still managed to reduce the images by a further 4.22%, saving 16.8 kb from the image files.
Page Speed - 84/100
Caching using.htaccess
I had a rummage around on the internet and found a few bits of reference reading (the best one being here). I hacked together some changes to my.htaccess file and placed them after the other entries in the.htaccess. (If you want a copy of what I added, email me.)
I now cache CSS files, image files and JS files all using different expiration dates.
Page Speed Score - 87/100
Final step - and this is the one which is overkill
I've started serving my static files from a cookieless domain. All images, CSS and JS files are now hosted on a separate cookieless domain. The lack of cookie reduces the total size of the requests on the server.
This is complete overkill for this small site - however, I did learn one interesting thing. Whilst not impossible to use a sub-domain, it does cause problems with Google Analytics. GA sets a domain wide cookie, so to use a sub-domain more effort is required (you have to amend the GA includes). I'm lazy so used another domain entirely.
Good luck with making your site faster!
For more information, please see Web Design Hull where James Greenwood blogs regularly.
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