Speed up your website with Apache Module - mod_pagespeed

What is mod_pagespeed?

As we have already discussed in some of our previous posts, website performance is one the key factors that contribute to the success of your business. Slow websites have track record of turning away the visitors/potential customers to competition.

For those who are running their show using Apache, mod_pagespeed is a very useful module that can help boost the performance of your website.

mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache 2.2+ module designed to automatically speed up your site by optimizing the various components of your web pages. The module does this by rewriting page resources using filters that adhere to web performance best practices. mod_pagespeed is the server version of the client-side Firefox module that analyzes web pages using similar best practices.

How does mod_pagespeed work?

The key areas of tuning are:

Optimize your resources (on-the-fly)
Better caching policies

mod_pagespeed utilizes a number of filters that can help you compress HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and optimize JPEG and PNG images, as well as configure better caching policies. mod_pagespeed rewrites resources into a server-side cache to be delivered instead of the original resources, so it is important to configure caching on your server correctly. The module essentially takes existing page resources and trims excess fat (unused resources in images for example), and improves caching (hashed resources with long expiry times). By configuring caching and HTTP compression and using mod_pagespeed, webmasters can speed up their sites by serving optimized resources.

FYI: Resources such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS are compressed either using GZIP compression or deflate. It depends on the type that browser supports (GZIP or Deflate).

Additional resource(s)

Noisy - Social Media Highway (Is Social Media really adding value or just another bubble waiting to burst)

There is lot of noise on all social media sites/networks... and very little value for the customers... unless these networks are directly impacting the bottom-line areas for the end-user, they will be like noisy highways... does any company provide service that groups like-minded twitter-ers.... into distinct groups that can provide value for the end-user... I like cheaptweets...

Is it really easy to follow 1000s on the social media, and filter the messages that really make sense for an individual... I understand that the 1st step is to establish your presence on social media network, but whats the objective.

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Google Analytics & WebMaster Tools – Does your site have SiteMap?

Are you a WordPress Blogger or have your own site/blog but dont have SITEMAP XML?

If you are planning to track your visitors, improve the conversions and performance of website, I would recommend you sign-up for Google analytics and Webmaster tools.

In June 2005, Google announced a new service called Google Sitemaps. This program allows webmaster to submit an index of URLs which they want to have included in Google's web search. It’s free to use and helps Google to get a more complete overview of your pages.

In order for Google to crawl through your site/pages it needs a special file called SITEMAP.XML. For my wordpress friends this is very easily achievable using the following plugins:

1. Google XML Sitemaps (Search in WordPress Plugins)

2. Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite support

Install the plug-in, Activate, and Configure the settings for the plug-ins… You may have to force create the SITEMAP 1st time. This plug-in(s) take care of submitting the sitemap xml file to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Good luck, with WebMasters and Analytics.

How to get repeat visitors to your site?

When you have a website online it is important for you to try and get new visitors to your site, but it’s also important to take care of the visitors that you actually already have. This is because you will want your existing visitors to keep returning to your site again and again. So, this is always going to be a double front battle on balancing your strategies for New & Existing visitors/customers. Hope you will find this article useful and interesting. Also, feel free to throw punches in the comments/forum with new ideas about the subject being highlighted here.

There are many ways that you can do this. Some of these include the following:

1. Updating your Website content continuously

This is an important factor to consider if you want your visitors to keep returning to your site. This is because if you keep on updating your sites content, then every time your visitors come back to your site they will see something new every time, which should then interest them even further. If you don’t update your content on a regular basis, then your visitors will end up getting bored of your site and will then go elsewhere. "Change is the only constant" - keeps constant in-flow of visitors to your site.

2. Making your site more sticky

Giving your site more stickiness will make it more addictive to your sites visitors, which will in return make them want to come back to your site. Check out this link

3. Checking your site for broken links

This is very important when having a site. If your site does not function properly, then your visitors will not even bother with it. One of the most annoying things when visiting a site is when it has continuous broken links.

If you find it hard to manually check your site for broken links, then a good piece of free software to use would be the REL Link Checker Lite, which can be downloaded from http://www.relsoftware.com

4. Getting other people’s opinions
When having a site, other than your own thoughts, it is also a good idea to get other people’s opinions. For example, the colours of your site, what parts people like on your site the most, what parts people dislike the most, etc. Getting opinions from your visitors like this will help you to find out what most people dislikes about your site, which means you can then improve these parts, making it better for your visitors in return.

5. Performance of your website

Last but not the least that I would like to discuss here is how fast your web pages appear. Performance is the key when it comes to ensure visitors don't flea away from your site. It helps reduce the bounce rate of the visitors.

Website Performance - What & how to prioritize?

In this session we will outline the most critical pieces to consider for performance enhancements and prioritize the same in 3 levels:

First Level of Actions

GZip / Compression (Enable HTTP compression) - you should plan to enable GZip compression "on-the-fly" thru .htaccess or PHP or thru a .Net Component in the front-end (ASP.NET code).
Optimize your images for the web (shrink) - You can use Adobe photoshop or one of several free tools to perform lossless image optimization. You can check out the article here.
Cache - Enable caching of objects on client-side and server-side as well. This helps the client browsers not to request the objects that are available locally and not set to expire.

Second Level of Actions

Combine CSS & JavaScript modules - Combining multiple CSS files into a single one. Apply same for JavaScripts as well. A word of caution, do not combine CSS with JS. You can even write modules that can perform this at run-time. We will discuss this in more details in future articles.
Minify CSS & JavaScripts - Compress CSS & JavaScripts so as it cleans up all whitespaces, tabs, and other types of characters that are not a part of language keywords and constructs.
Create CSS Sprites - Usually lot of HTTP requests are generated from browser to the server on image-savvy sites. A technique called "CSS sprites" is available that can help reduce the total # of images by combining small images into a single image. Then CSS rules can be written to read the pieces from the Sprite'd image.
Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Third Level of Actions

Remove unused CSS
Minify HTML response - Also known as compressing the HTML response by removing unnecessary whitespaces and tabs.
Delay advertising blocks - Advertising and marketing tags must be placed towards the bottom of the body & delayed execution.

Additional Reference(s):

How to reduce the # of HTTP requests / page load?

Major culprit that impacts the page performance for any website is the total # of HTTP requests that gets fired from the browser to the web server. So, exactly what results into the generation of HTTP requests is what we need to understand 1^st and figure out a way to measure and investigate the areas that need attention.

Each of the below request(s) from the browser to the server would result into a new HTTP request causing the need for request-response mechanism to kick-in:

CSS file(s)
JavaScript file(s)
Image file(s)
and, any other downloadable resource on page load

In order to view the total # of HTTP requests for your page, you can install one of the best free tools called “AOL Pagetest”.

AOL Pagetest is a completely free and open source tool for analyzing your Web pages. It is the only free tool for Internet Explorer that dissects all of the requests the browser makes and displays them in a waterfall view of the page load making it easy to spot bottlenecks. Included in the waterfall display are the DNS lookup times, Socket connect times as well as each http request. It also provides the full request and response headers for each request.

Additional information about AOL Pagetest can be found here:

Facts about Website Performance

Research indicates that 80% of the end-users response time is spent on the front-end, remaining 20% includes all of database & other back-end activities such as web-services.

There are numerous factors that contribute towards the end-users response time on the front-end:

# of HTTP Requests
Whether or not if the site is using CDN (Content Delivery Networks)
Caching
Compression
Optimization
Minification
Placement of Stylesheets in the HTML
Placement of JavaScripts in the HTML
CSS expressions usage in the code
Are your JS and CSS internal to HTML or external
Redirects
Duplicate scripts
Are your AJAX cachable?
# of DOM elements
Are you using iFrames?
Do you have lot of 404s (Page not found errors) on your site?
Cookie size
Image size & optimization
CSS Sprites
Missing image size (height and width) in the code
Size of HTML
Size of Javascripts & CSS

We will discuss possibly each of the above in sufficient details in up-coming posts with examples, tools, suggestions, tips, techniques, and tricks to boost page performance.