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5 Quick Website Optimization Tips

• Enable File Caching

  Enabling File Caching will speed up subsequent views to your website, allowing the browser to grab stored images from it's internal cache if possible, instead of downloading a new copy from the server.

  On Linux servers running Apache you usually have access to a file called .htaccess, usually placed in the root of your public websites directory.

  I've found the following code block to be quite handy with this:

  <IfModule mod_headers.c>
<FilesMatch "\\.(ico|pdf|flv)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=10886400, public"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "(js|css)">
Header set Cache-Control: "max-age=29030400, public"
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>


• Register Your Site with Google Analytics

  An essential to help you discover where people are running into problems with your website. For example, you may notice a percentage of people are running into 404 - Page Not Found errors then leaving your website.

  To sign-up, simply Visit: http://www.google.com/analytics/, follow Google's simple sign-up proceedure and paste the final code given into the bottom of your websites, just above the closing body tag.

• Enable Page Compression If Possible.

  A simple line of code for those running PHP-based websites.

  Add the following code into a file called application_top.php then include it at the top of your php pages.

  ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

  This compresses the website by around 33%, which both improves the speed of loading and reduces the amount of bandwidth required by your website. You can even do this with your javascript and stylesheet files for more compression but I will go into this in another tutorial.

• Check your pages in multiple browsers.

  Do they look the same across the board? If not, why not? Does the website still retain the same functionality?

  Some on-line applications such as Browsershots give you a reasonable idea of how your site will look in a variety of browsers although in the long run you may find it more effective to download versions of browsers and test them yourself.

  Searching for the names of any popular web-browser (e.g. Firefox, IE, Safari, Mozilla, etc, etc) will bring up it's download page. Although if you are looking for older versions for backwards compatability, visit Old Version and checkout Multiple IEs also

• Ask people for their opinions on your website.

  Okay, no single design is going to appeal to everyone but asking a community for their opinions isn't a shameful thing to do. Particularly when you're only getting started with website designing and development. Having a fresh pair of eyes is a great thing to have, so having lots of them can prove handy also.

  There are many On-line Communities out there including Webmaster World, Daniweb and Google Webmaster Central

Viewed 1279 times since 03 Mar 2010

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