Category: Site Speed & Performance

Ways to speed up your website & code. I will be posting cool things here & tricks I try to use everyday on my clients sites

Validate html and css

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Lee Thornton

This one is much easier said than done sometimes. I have many sites that I’ve never even looked at through the validators but then there’s other sites that I have validated correctly. It always helps to validate your HTML and CSS and it makes the pages load faster. It also gets you better rankings on the search engines.
Validate your HTML here: http://validator.w3.org/
Validate your CSS here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

It’s also very important to have a doctype at the top of your HTML document. Here’s a recommended list of doctypes you can use:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

If you’re editing your html in Dreamweaver then it will…Read More

Tags: Site Speed & Performance
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Gzip on Apache

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Lee Thornton

One really easy way to speed up a website is using gzip via your .htaccess file. All you have to do is put this code at the top of your .htaccess file:

# compress all text & html & css & javascript:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
 
Each block at the end of the line determines what you will be compressing. Normally you would not have any problems with anything other than JavaScript. I would recommend using the above line without “text/javascript” at first. Once you add “text/javascript” you will want to test out your JavaScript libraries to make sure everything…Read More

Tags: Site Speed & Performance
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Firebug for firefox

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Lee Thornton

This plugin is a must have for any developer. Get it here:
http://getfirebug.com/

Tags: Site Speed & Performance
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Google speed

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Lee Thornton

Great plugin for fire fix firebugs that evaluates your site speed and offers great suggestions for improvement.
Get it here: http://code.google.com/speed/

Tags: Site Speed & Performance, Google speed
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Yslow

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Lee Thornton

Slow is a great plugin for determining the slow parts of your application. It also tells you ways to speed up your application.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

You have to have firefox firebug to use it.

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.htaccess for old browser

Posted on February 11, 2011 by administrator

Below are some good examples of how to handle older browsers when using gzip and expiration dates on your files. Older browsers sometimes have difficulties with gzip so you may want to use this code as well.

# Enable ETag
FileETag MTime Size
# Set expiration header
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType text/css A2592000
# Compress some text file types
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript application/javascript
# Deactivate compression for buggy browsers
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0 no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Tags: htaccess tips, Site Speed & Performance
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