Hello,
I’m just discovering this testing site and find it a great tool but I have some trouble about the results. Can you tell me if they are good, not good and what certainly needs to be change.
[url=http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110117_3W_6K0/]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110117_3W_6K0/[/url]
thank you
check out http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110117_3W_6K0/1/performance_optimization/
make sure to fix the first 5 columns - they r easiest to implement. the first 4 are no brainer.
Your times are a lot faster than I would have expected given that keep-alives are disabled. That should be your #1 thing to attack because it should just be a config change on the server hosting the site and it will have quite a big impact.
After that my other biggest suggestions would be:
Set a long expires time for your static content (requires you to change the file names if you change the files but it will be a hige win for any repeat visitors)
Move your javascript out of the head and to the bottom of the page (or make it async) if you can without breaking page functionality
Create a sprite out of the number images
Thanks for your answer.
So If I understand what you are writing, the keep-alive depends on my hosting? I should ask them to make it enable?
Second, I’m trying to put an expires header on the images, but I’m not succeeding with this. I find a lot of examples but is confusing, can you help me with this?
What about the cookie column? It’s return a cookie session_id, where does this come from?
regards,
Didier
Yes, you should contact your hosting about the keep-alives.
Ignore the cookie column, it’s not really worth addressing in your case.
For the expires, here is an example of what I have in my .htaccess config:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A31536000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A31536000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A31536000
ExpiresByType image/png A31536000
ExpiresByType image/bmp A31536000
ExpiresByType text/css A31536000
ExpiresByType text/javascript A31536000
ExpiresByType application/javascript A31536000
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A31536000
You can strip that down to just the image mime types if that makes sense (and this is assuming Apache hosting). Do be careful to make sure that you won’t break future changes on your site by enabling the expires though. If you don’t make sure that you can change your file names if they are ever updated you will do more damage than good by enabling it.
Thanks,
-Pat
Hi Pat,
I don’t understand what you mean by “If you don’t make sure that you can change your file names if they are ever updated you will do more damage than good by enabling it.”
I get an ERROR 500 when I put your code in the htaccess. I suppose that the required modules are not loaded, so I suppose I have to ask my hosting to activate them
thanks Didier
Yep, you need them to enable the expires module.
If yo set an expires time on an image (or other file like javascript) you are telling the browser that the file at that URL will not change for at least the amount of time for the expiration (1 year I think in the example I gave you) so the browser will save it on your user’s disk and not ask you for it again until the expiration time comes.
If you decide you want to change your logo (or the site layout) yo can’t just update the logo file because the browsers of your users that have visited your site will not ask for it since you told them it wouldn’t change. You need to give the new file a new name and then change anywhere it is referenced (in the html for example) to make sure it points to the new file.
It gets really bad if you change your whole site functionality and layout to the point where the new HTML will only work with the new CSS, Javascript and images. If you re-use the same file names you could get into a situation where the browsers are loading the new HTML but are still using the old css, javascript and images.
A big thank you to you Pat.
I’ll contact my hosting and ask them to do the job. Once they make it, I’ll retest my site.
See you around
Didier