Site speed boost in 5 minutes

As a result of recommendations made by Google PageSpeed Tool, PingDom and Yahoo’s ySlow extension, I’ve just implemented some htaccess changes as well as gzip compression on my live demo server.

I’m seeing a dramatic overall speed increase from the server across all my live demo websites.

Here's the PingDom test results after optimizations:



My “PageSpeed” and “ySlow” scores have all bumped up as well. They were already pretty good, but I’m constantly trying to optimize for speed and every little bit helps. Especially as more and more users connect to the web over mobile.
The most dramatic impact can be made simply be adding a few lines to your htaccess file. This file is usually located inside your site’s “root” directory and is just named "htaccess" with no file extension (you may need to adjust your FTP program's preferences to be able to view files of this type).

For example, to address pagespeed/ySlow nags on “gZip Compression, “Expires headers” and “eTags“, I’ve added the following to the top of my htaccess files on all my demo sites:

After applying those settings and updating your htaccess file on your server, you should be all set. However, if, after several hours, the tools are still reporting that your files are not compressed, you may go a bit further as follows:

How to Enable GZIP Compression on your webserver via cpanel

Login to cPanel account for the user account which GZIP compression wants to be turned on. Then click on Optimize Website under Software / Services.

User will be presented with options to compress all content or compress the specified MIME types, with a text box to specify file types to compress is selected (default is text/html text/plain text/xml). Choose either one setting to enable GZIP compression on all websites hosted by the particular account. Click on Update Settings when done.



As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve chosen these mime types to compress on my server at clickbump.com

text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript text/css

Tip: Possible MIME types include text/html, text/plain, text/xml, text/css, text/javascript, application/javascript, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml, application/rss+xml, application/atom_xml, application/x-javascript, application/x-httpd-php, application/x-httpd-fastphp, application/x-httpd-eruby, and image/svg+xml.

In conclusion

These are some quick tips that you can implement that should dramatically increase your overall server speed and performance. Once you have these in place, you can look to your site's theme or template for further optimizations. Here are 3 that you should consider first:

1) Optimize your site's images with a tool like this > PunyPNG - PNG Compression and Image Optimization - Gracepoint After Five

2) Combine your css scripts into a single file and minify them to remove white space, line breaks and comments

3) Move your scripts to the footer of your theme, just before the closing body tag