kieranbarnes Independent PHP, WordPress & CubeCart Programmer

Site Performance Quick Fixes

I've been playing around with YSlow for a while now, now I decided to a quick test on this blog.

This blog, according to YSlow rates a frumpy Grade D, with a score of 61. Not bad, but not great.
A bit of .htaccess trickery should give me a few extra points... Excellent Grade C, with a score of 73.
Here's the modified .htaccess file. Some of this is blatantly stolen borrowed from the AskApache Guru.

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)
<FilesMatch ".(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$">
ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

# Set up caching on media files for 1 week
<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$">
ExpiresDefault A604800
Header append Cache-Control "public"
</FilesMatch>

# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files
<FilesMatch ".(xml|txt|html|js|css)$">
ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# Force no caching for dynamic files
<FilesMatch ".(php|cgi|pl|htm)$">
ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</FilesMatch>

# deflate JS and CSS
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
        <FilesMatch ".(js|css)$">
                SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
        </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

# Disable pesky ETags.
Header unset ETag
FileETag None

What have we done?

• Setup caching on most of the commonly served files
• Set Javascript and CSS files be GZipped
• Disabled ETags.

So, jumping up a grade for just a simple cut and paste job? Can't be bad.

What else can we do? Well, theres lots. For example, I use the LightView Plus plugin, it's very JS & CSS heavy. Disabling it adds 13 points, taking me up to a score of 86. It also saves 50k of code.

Take a look at your WordPress plugins. Do you really need them all? Perhaps try loading the plugins only on the pages you require them on. cformsII lets you do exactly that!

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