How to Speed Up Your Website

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Welcome back dear visitors. Wait for most awaited article ends now. We are demonstrating here the best available method for gearing up your website that is rock solid. Our guide is for the websites that are hosted on Apache server. We are taking advantage of Apache 2.0 and going to use server based optimisation for our web site instead of any plug-in or script available in market.

But before starting our work, we need to analyze our web site. Open the following URL http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ and enter your website address in “Enter URL to Diagnose” text field and hit enter. New screen will welcome you; enter the CAPTCHA keywords and wait for detailed analysis of your site. In analysis result page you will find a lot of information under Diagnosis heading. Check the total size of your web site and the Download times. Don’t close or change this page, we will use it to compare the results.
Apache 2.0 has great improvement and has introduced some new modules and improved. To speed up our websites, hosted on Apache 2.0.x, we have two approaches.

• Deflate Approach
• Gzip Approach.

Detailed information about them is available on web so without going in complexity and detail, I will explain both in simple words. Deflate is the raw compression method, no file information, header, file size and checksum is given in deflate based compression.

While Gzip is the combination of deflate and all other information that are missing in deflate. Remember, Deflate is faster than Gzip. Detailed information is available here. mod_deflate.c is the core module working behind the scene for deflate type of compression.

Let’s start our project. Open your FTP client software and download the file .htaccess file from root of website i.e /public_html/.
After downloading file, open it in your faviourate editor. You will see some coding, don’t edit them, just add the following code to the file.

# BEGIN Compress text files
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png|rar|zip)$ no-gzip
# properly handle requests coming from behind proxies
Header append Vary User-Agent
# END Compress text files

In above coding, we called the module first, to compress all the contents and then manually defined file types to exclude from compression. Don’t compress pdf, image and movie files as they are already compressed. For optimising images use adobe and optimised file types like .png, where applicable.
For older browsers who don’t handle compression add this code after the above code.

# Properly handle old browsers that do not support compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html


This code is guiding the old browsers according to their functionality. So the complete code for speeding up your web site, that is secure as well, is;

# BEGIN Compress text files
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png|rar|zip)$ no-gzip
# properly handle requests coming from behind proxies
Header append Vary User-Agent
# END Compress text files
# Properly handle old browsers that do not support compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html


Now upload the file to same website root folder and hit refresh button. Open a new webpage and enter same URL we used to analyze our web site earlier. Repeat the process and compare the difference in both results. Check the new size of your web page and the downloading time on various speeds. At the end of same page, you have suggestions to further speed up your site. You have gained at least 35-40% optimisation of website.

This is the part one of optimizing the website. We are preparing the second part which is primarily focused on wordpress. Combined effect of both parts will give you ultimate speed to your wordpress web site.

Your comments and suggestions will encourage us. Keep visiting us.

*****Update*****

How to Speed Up Your Website Part-II

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