Looking into Speed SEO...

Creating subdomains to improve parallelize of downloads e.g. images and avatars should be easy. (The subdomain is just a cname record for main domain)

But how to enable compression of css and javascript files in Apache/WHM? Now only forum pages are gzip:ed. I tried to locate mod_deflate in WHM Apache configuration but cant see anything related to that. (I dont want to rebuild/compile from command line)

Also wanted to set expire for images, but after reading Mert run into problems, I will give it a skip for time being.

Also saw Mert had a blog post how to move htaccess into httpd.conf, will look more into that later too.

Google Webmaster Tool rank my website as slow, so I would like to improve a bit.

If you really want to speed up things , you should seriously consider switching from apache to nginx. I am doing tests for one of my customers within their test board and the speed difference me and other testers realize can't be compared to any apache optimization you apply.

Hm, editing postbit...

<img src="{vb:raw post.avatarurl}"

If its just a relative URL, it should work to just add http://avatar.domain.com/ in front of that variable, right?

Ok, worked fine.

Sounds interesting, keep us updated with the outcome of it. If everything work as it should then it could be an option.

Originally Posted by Mert Gökçeimam

If you really want to speed up things , you should seriously consider switching from apache to nginx. I am doing tests for one of my customers within their test board and the speed difference me and other testers realize can't be compared to any apache optimization you apply.

I have done a lot of editing now in many templates, will be interesting to see Webmaster Tools update for Site Performance. Seems to lag one week behind for that info.

I created 3 sub-domains; avatar, img and scripts.

I believe you misunderstand one thing.


Creating subdomains to improve parallelize of downloads e.g. images and avatars should be easy. (The subdomain is just a cname record for main domain)

This doesn't mean you creating subdomains on your server and still keep the files on same server. In order to speed up , you should possibly signup to a cloud hosting solution like amazon s3 and host your static files within cloud hosting.

Yes, thats even better. But even this solution speeds up a lot, according to articles / tests on the net. The main reason for this is to have more downloads at once, usually a browser have 2 or 4 at a time as a limit. (Here is one article http://www.websiteoptimization.com/s...weak/parallel/ ) The data amount is not the big deal, its the number of objects that slow down a webpage and if you can download more at once, improves your speed.

Now I have to look into how to turn on compression in Apache for all files (not binaries tho).

Also these two things above make Google happy I believe, as their tool report it as important issues to fix. (Expire on images a 3rd important thing) Google Speed Test dont complain about Parallel downloads now after my changes.

I just realised I shouldnt have edited the templates, would be much smarter to use ImagePath StyleVars to change Image directory to a subdomain path instead.

Enable mod_deflate was a big improvement, only css is not compressed for some reason, but javascript files are much smaller and I feel the site much faster myself.

Also changed cookie domain to exclude the subdomains, and avoid the cookie data overhead sent with images. (Another good reason to use parallel download even if same domain)

Will look and try with expire headers for images now...

Tried to set expire for images, it seems to work for forumhome, but not on showforum page. Any clues why?

Happy with my changes now and speed test score (google app) is a lot better than few days ago.

- Parallelize downloads (By creating subdomains)
- Cookieless domain for images (Exclude your subdomains for cookies)
- mod_deflate to compress all files
- mod_expires to set an expire for objects

So far it went smooth.

Great news. Please let us know a bit further down the road to see how it is working out for you.

Update!

Google Webmaster tools reported average 10.x seconds for my site in the past.

Now it reports 4.x seconds average, but take a while for webmaster tools to really adapt to your changes. (Give it a few weeks to get more data)

One big flaw for me was an external iframe currency rates thingy, its removed, and that was a big part of the slow down, I only keep it on one money/investment forum now. (So that forum is still slow I guess, it was site wide in the past)

Overall, my improvements above has been very positive for my site.

(That said, big improvement for me, but google still think sites should be less than 2s, otherwise its slow. But in my case, from 10.x s to 4.x s is a big improvement in any case)

Nicke- interesting post, thanks for sharing your results. I've been working on making similar changes recently. how did you exclude your subdomains for cookies?

weird that you are seeing mod_deflate compressing javascript but not css. I am having the exact opposite problem!