Faster page loads for DUMMYS

[jackit_chick]

Thanks for the link.

1. Browser: Yo! You got index.html?
2. Server: (Looking it up…)
3. Sever: Totally, dude! It’s right here!
4. Browser: That’s rad, I’m downloading it now and showing the user.

Yep, I guess that's as close to laymen's terms as I'm going to get. But I still don't know what to do. I don't even know what as .js file is.

In your main root folder you should see an .htaccess file! You basically copy and paste that code in there. Do a back up though! So if it crashes your site then you can just reload the old .htaccess. I usually just name it .htaccess.old and load my edited one. Then if it breaks it I can delete the edited and just rename the old one back to it's original name!

So take that code at the bottom of the page that looks like "# compress text, html..." etc, and copy and paste it at the end of your .htaccess.

[Sweet Tooth #3]

Thanks for the feed back everybody.

Dream Host has mod pagespeed available even for shared hosting if I understand correctly. But a lot of people on their blog say that it doesn't always work that great. And Dream Host doesn't have a customer service phone # available which freaks me out a little bit. They didn't even respond to any of the blog comments which seems sketchy. But I am open to switching hosts. Has anybody ever used them?

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2010/11/04...now-available/

My host (iPage) offers something called The Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator. http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/dsa.html

It caches your pages on different servers around the globe and then apparently, the cached page is retrieved from the nearest server based on the location of the person searching. Has anyone ever heard of this?

It's $2.95 a month to add this to unlimited domains. The only thing is that it limits you to 100k (cached) page views per month for each domain. But I'm assuming I can buy another packet if I exceed that. And If I do exceed that...well $$$$$

And I love iPage... the 24 hr customer service line is the main reason, but there's many others too.

Could the solution be this easy...an extra $2.95 a month?

[Sweet Tooth #3]

And I love iPage... the 24 hr customer service line is the main reason, but there's many others too.

Changed my mind. Screw iPage. In WMT 1 of my sites is showing an average load time of 9 seconds. And when I checked some online tools today I was seeing page load times of over 10 seconds, yesterday it was 2 seconds. Can these wild fluctuations be caused by anything other than slow servers? Even if I do use caching, I want to base my websites on a solid foundation.

And when I asked an iPage customer service rep about it, he got all pissy and defensive about it.

Just found these guys, MDD Hosting http://www.mddhosting.com/hosting.php

They use something called Light Speed instead of Apache.

Here's what it claims.

"LiteSpeed is up to 9 times faster than Apache web hosting, processes PHP 50% faster, and 3 times faster than SSL Apache Hosting. LiteSpeed hosting fully supports .htaccess, mod_rewrite, and everything else that Apache is well known for - if your site works on an Apache host it will work even better and faster on our LiteSpeed based solutions!"

Is there any truth to this?

It has great reviews from ratepoint.com which seems to be a legitimate review website.

I understand Hostgator is a safe bet, but I can't help be intrigued with MDD Hosting. It's a smaller host that charges a little more but claims to focus on quality. No fake claims about unlimited this or free that...

Here's a review from somebody who actually switched from iPage:

http://reviews.ratepoint.com/review/...on-May-13-2011

I hope my original question isn't getting too out of hand.

[deepsand]

Page Speed Score (Firefox) - What's a Good Number?.

[Sweet Tooth #3]

Page Speed Score (Firefox) - What's a Good Number?.

C' mon Deepsand, throw me a bone here...

Do you know about any of the above mentioned stuff I talked about?

[deepsand]

You said

I hope my original question isn't getting too out of hand.

The post that I cited was intended to signal that, IMO, you and others are obsessing over a relatively minor matter, one where very many of the material factors are wholly out of your control.

[Sweet Tooth #3]

I think I've found a partial answer to my problem. The iPage servers are slow and unreliable. Every once in awhile I would get a page load time around 2 seconds, but very often they would creep up into the 5, 6, 7, and according to google...10+ range. Yikes!

But I signed up for MDD, and their Lite Speed powered servers are fast! The difference I've noticed myself is significant. And according to iwebtool, my load times range between .01 and .03 seconds per KB. This is much faster than my competitors.

I also checked the pingdom tool. They list my load times from the Netherlands at about 2 seconds, and within the US, it's around 1 second. And these are for pages loaded with Adsense ads. I also think the free theme I use is very cluncky and heavy. They list me as faster than 75% of sites on the web.

Here's some of the stuff I see:

hxxp://website dot org/wp-content/themes/suffusion/style.css?ver=3.8.2

hxxp://website dot org/wp-content/themes/suffusion/skins/light-theme-royal-blue/skin.css?ver=3.8.2

hxxp://website dot org/wp-content/themes/suffusion/rounded-corners.css?ver=3.8.2

hxxp://website dot org/?ver=3.8.2&suffusion-css=css

hxxp://website dot org/wp-includes/js/comment-reply.js?ver=20090102

What is this crap?

There's also a few more like these. I don't exactly know what they are, but my competitors don't have these showing up. They have less objects, and of smaller size.

Here's an explanation from the Suffusion theme control panel:

With effect from version 3.7.4 of Suffusion the following options have been removed:

* CSS Compression - GZip, minify etc. A new CSS minification option has been introduced only for the generated CSS, so that it doesn't clutter the site's HTML.
* wordpress JS compression - GZip
* Site GZip compression
* CDN JQuery support

Now things are fast enough right now, but I want to improve as much as I can. It sounds like a better theme would help...Thesis perhaps?

And even though I haven't seen any dramatic improvements in rankings, I do have peace of mind. What a bargain for an extra 4$ a month.

Any thoughts???

Now, I'm off to watch Cain Velasquez hammer Junior dos Santos. 9:28 PM Eastern time.

Oh crap, Junior dos Santos is entering to the Rocky theme song. We'll see.....awesome fight!

Wow, that happened quick. So quick that I could've changed my prediction, but I didn't. He couldn't knock out Roy Nelson, but he knocked out Cain in 1 min. 4 sec....you have to be kidding me!

But that's what I love about the UFC, you never know what's going to happen!