Page compression on 1&1

[cbarling]

... page load speeds seem to be fairly decent when I have compared them to our competitors ...

Of course one of the things that doesn't get mentioned that often is that when Actinic is serving vanilla HTML files it will always be faster (all other things being equal) than a database driven site.

Chris

[robmob]

Just thought I would report back after a couple of weeks of having implemented gzip via the .htaccess file. In the Google Webmnaster Tools Site Performance Section I can see an improvement in page load speed by a factor of 3.

However what is worrying and I am not sure if it is related my indexed pages count has reduced from approx 1000 pages to nearer 250 - we have not made any other changes to the site in last last two weeks and not made any changes to our sitemap either.

Could this be related? - strange how it happened at the same time.

[robmob]

Some more interesting stats comparing the week before and the week after shows a 28% increase in organic google traffic and 6% improvement in bounce rate.

[alexwren]

Rob,

According to Firebug it reckons you don't have gzip enabled. Did you turn it off or was there another reason for it not being on anymore? I am also interested to hear more about your stats on Webmaster tools. Can you tell me what the average load time was in the diagnostics graph?

Alex

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Alex which site have you tested, as I have just checked the performancemotorcare.com site and for me Firefox PageSpeed plugin has a green tick for 'Enable Compression'
and both http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/check_http_gzip.php and http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php indicate the gzip is enabled and working.

I don't believe gzip is enabled on the other site in his signature 'clicktorch.com'.

[robmob]

Alex

Darren is correct - only have it on the performancemotorcare site.

I will PM you on some of the other info.

[robmob]

Just another quick update. I am pleased to say our indexed page numbers have gone back up to their previous level so i assume unconnected with anything we did with implementing gzip. The visitor numbers have also remained at the increased level.

Now just need to take a look at the browser caching suggested earlier.

Hope this helps.

[globalee]

htaccess Gzip SSL

Google's Page Speed recommendations are very interesting indeed and are based on improving the speed and delivery of your website from server to browser, including the rendering speed of the HTML and code in the browser as well.
GZIP compression is just one aspect.
Another element to look at is utilising browser caching. This reduces overall load times and helps with website performance as well:

You can implement browser caching through the htaccess file as well with something like:

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0 
 ExpiresActive On 
 ExpiresDefault A0 
 
# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?) 
 <FilesMatch ".(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$"> 
 ExpiresDefault A29030400 
 Header append Cache-Control "public" 
 </FilesMatch> 
 
# Set up caching on media files for 1 week 
 <FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$"> 
 ExpiresDefault A604800 
 Header append Cache-Control "public" 
 </FilesMatch> 
 
# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files 
 <FilesMatch ".(xml|txt|html|js|css)$"> 
 ExpiresDefault A7200 
 Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate" 
 </FilesMatch> 
 
# Force no caching for dynamic files 
 <FilesMatch ".(php|cgi|pl|htm)$"> 
 ExpiresActive Off 
 Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, 
 proxy-revalidate, no-transform" 
 Header set Pragma "no-cache" 
 
</FilesMatch>

We always recommend that the first priority is to optimise the existing HTML, CSS, images and javascript on your website so that you get the best possible performance prior to any compression or caching.
We have seen some significant improvement in websites who have had their HTML/CSS overhauled with properly optimised images and CSS and javascript code as opposed to those sites that only implement GZIP or caching.
The rendering speed in the browser can be significantly improved asl well, which all adds up to a better experience for the customer.

Hi fergus, I have noticed that when implementing deflate in the htaccess file it causes the SSL certificate to fail when on secure pages, any ideas? (i have removed the compression for now)
CHeers, Lee