Improve your site performance, improve SEO

[NewEraCracker]

Hello,

Today I'll present you a shameful reality that causes Internet to be slow. Its called careless webmasters/sysadmins.

You certainly noticed some sites are faster than another, this is due several reasons, one of them is non-proper cache headers and non-proper gzip.

You can test your site speed here:
GTmetrix | Website Speed and Performance Optimization

But now how do I improve it?

If you are using apache its pretty easy.
Open your .htaccess inside www or the dir that represents the root of webserver and add (if doesn't exist):

<FilesMatch "\.(gif|ico|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|swf|pdf|mp3|mp4|xml|txt|js|css)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=691200"
</FilesMatch>

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/x-javascript
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml
</IfModule>

Please note sometimes minor issues may come from mod_deflate, if you face blank pages or similar side-effects remove from .htaccess

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/x-javascript
	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml
</IfModule>

If you are using nginx its easy as well

Open up nginx.conf and add in http directive

    ## Compression
    gzip on;
    gzip_buffers      8 8k;
    gzip_comp_level   5;
    gzip_http_version 1.0;
    gzip_min_length   1k;
    gzip_types        text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/x-icon image/gif;
    gzip_vary on;

Now add in server directive

        # add expire headers
        location ~* ^.+.(gif|ico|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|swf|pdf|mp3|mp4|xml|txt|js|css)$ {
            expires 8d;
        }

Save

Now reload nginx.

nginx -s reload

Regards,
NewEraCracker

NewEraCracker Reviewed by NewEraCracker on 6th Sep 2010. Improve your site performance, improve SEO Hello, Today I'll present you a shameful reality that causes Internet to be slow. Its called careless webmasters/sysadmins. You certainly noticed some sites are faster than another, this is due several reasons, one of them is non-proper cache headers and non-proper gzip. You can test your site speed here: GTmetrix | Website Speed and Performance Optimization But now how do I improve it? Rating: 5