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

[Mr Happy]

One propblem with this is mod_deflate is off by default on Apache servers and you have to enable it first. If your on shared hosting and it's not enabled don't even bother to request it to be enabled as it's noob or cheap hosting so just move instead.

[GoPantheoN]

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

This caches the given file types and make website faster ?

[NewEraCracker]

In fact it seems I did a small mistake try this instead to send cache-control headers:

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

It sends cache headers with request.

Let me show you:

GET /links.txt HTTP/1.1
Host: deioncube.in
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pt-PT; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100701 Firefox/3.5.11
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: pt-pt,pt;q=0.8,en;q=0.5,en-us;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://deioncube.in/


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:47:55 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 376
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:17:40 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:47:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=691200
Accept-Ranges: bytes


GET /links.txt HTTP/1.1
Host: deioncube.in
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pt-PT; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100701 Firefox/3.5.11
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: pt-pt,pt;q=0.8,en;q=0.5,en-us;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://deioncube.in/
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:17:40 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0


HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:47:56 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:17:40 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:47:56 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=691200

[xfernanx]

Thanx I just did this and worked... though I still needing more tricks

Before


After


Thanx

[NewEraCracker]

make sure you tried updated version

[DLow]

@ new era

update ur thread i almost missed it

[NewEraCracker]

1st post is updated
Enjoy

[Royal King]

Didn't change much, but still thanks

[SJshah]

I use:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 4 weeks"

then:

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 2 weeks"

for specific types.