Shared Hosting

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

I’m new to page load optimization. I’ve done as much reading as I can find to improve my page (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120726_54_5DN/), and the areas it seems that are in biggest need are enabling keep-alives to reduce the number of TCP connections, compressing some files, and enabling caching of static resources.

So I’m familiar with compressing the files. I understand what caching is, but I’m unable to find how to enable it for my images and other static files. I’m on a Windows shared hosting plan. I’ve seen some articles that talk about doing things in a .htaccess file for Unix, but I can’t find what I can do in a Windows environment. Am I correct that there is nothing I can do in my actual html to enable the caching?

I’m even less familiar with “keep-alives”, but this looks like it can have the biggest impact for my site. The site is in Classic ASP, and as I said, on a shared server. Again, most documentation I’ve seen is for Unix servers. To enable keep-alives for my site, do I need to rely on a server setting (which I probably can’t get from my shared host)? I saw a post that looked like you can send a header with your document to enable it. It was a PHP example, but if that would work, then I would think an ASP line of
Response.AddHeader “connection”, “keep-alive”
might work. Does that make sense or am I way off?

2

IIS supports setting caching lifetimes on a per-directory basis and for configuring keep-alives. Your best bet is to reach out to your hosting provider to see if those options are available for you to configure.

Another option that you can look into is to use something like Cloudflare in front of your site. They will be able to do keep-alives, compression (and even cache extension) pretty much automatically and all with their free offering. The only thing you’d have to sort out is if you’d be able to move your DNS over to them.