Any suggestions to speed up site load time?

[coryp]

Hello,

CMS Version 1.9.1 - Hosted at iPower | PHP 5.2.12 | MySQL 5.0.45

I've got my site set up @ iPower and I like them more than 1&1 for a host, so I'm really hoping to not switch. Is there any internal tweaks to my install I can perform to help speed up my site load time? Once again, thanks again for any help or suggestions everyone.

http://accimpress.com/

Regards,
Cory

[Dr.CSS]

First make sure the page is valid...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1 ... ess.com%2F

Then search forum for speeding up sites...

[coryp]

Thanks Dr,

Here's what I did. I ran validator on the page you suggested. Everything checks out besides Facebook's like button.
Also I checked the boards and tried some other things:

I added this to .htaccess:

Code: Select all

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

Also, another user suggested running this optimizer:
http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

Which I did and cleaned up more HTML. I turned on debug in config.php and checked what's loading and when, etc-- but much of that is gibberish to me, being more of a designer. There def seems to be a slight increase in load time, but I'm hoping to get it just a tick faster. Are there any modules that CMSMS loads that I can dump? Also, do all those extra unused templates and stylesheets that come pre-loaded effect the load time?

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions! If there's anything else you think I should consider, I'd be much obliged.

Regards,
Cory

[calguy1000]

Page performance is a complex thing. Covering many facets, including server location, network bandwidth, server load, server type (WAMP/LAMP/IIS/etc) the actual code on the server, database load, the data that you are pulling from the database, database optimization, query optimization, image optimization, html optimization, compression, stylesheet optimization, considering your visitors browsers, and how your users browse your sites, you must also consider your content (how much is there, and where are you getting it from), and the growth plans for your website as well... and there are probably other considerations.

Each and everything you do for performance has a cost for its perceived benefit. You have to analyze exactly what your site needs before making ANY changes. i.e: Disabling the session cache limiter can and will have side effects for any site that displays different content to different users. Page optimization is something you should do a great deal of reading about before haphazardly making a change. You need to know ALL of the costs for these benefits, and how these costs will effect your site.

i.e: Is your site dynamic (does it have forms that users must fill in? is the content time dependent? is different data displayed to different users? do the images change? how much data are you harboring in the site? is this data mostly static (don't change much) or are only portions of it static? Which browsers are you primarily concerned about? Are you pulling data from external sites?

CMSMS 1.9.3 will do some things to assist in perceived performance increases for most sites that are displaying mostly static content (i.e: maybe a few pictures, and content doesn't change too often, every few days to monthly) Most of these changes in 1.9.3 are just changes to the default .htaccess file that ships with CMSMS.

Additionally, there are tools that an experienced site developer can use to reduce server load times on some sites. i.e: the {cge_cache} tag that is included with the CGExtensions module. The scriptdeploy module can be used by an experienced developer to assist in optimizing javascript and stylesheet deployment. etc.

Additionally, you may improve performance by analyzing the queries on your most frequently used pages and adding database indexes to make these queries faster. You can also play with your .htaccess and the headers and expires plugins (depending of course on the environment that you are hosted in).

So please, use research, caution, and good judgment before you make any changes to your site, or recommend changes to others.

[uniqu3]

@coryp
First get ySlow and PageSpeed addons for Firefox, fix problems that these addons will report like "reduce http requests, optimize images (you could use data uri for modern browser, calguy is working on a module as far as i know), compress and combine your stylesheets, javascript, html (with some if,else you can even load only specific stylesheets or javascript for specific pages where these are needed), check with your host what they support like activating gzip with htaccess and other options".

[alaw]

Are you using a lot of global content blocks on your page. It is my experience that these can slow down the site due to the extra database hits to get the content. I typically use php include files instead.

[Mich-adg]

Hi, i'm looking too for a specific optimization. Pagespeed (from Firebug) tell me that i can optimize the image caching and specify a delay expiration for many images loaded from different folders( /images, /uploads ...). I cheched the box "cachable" for all the pages of the site, some images are loaded via the "image" option field and displayed as page header.
Does anybody knows how to cache these images?