Notice: This is a discussion thread for comments about the SitePoint article, Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps.
Mmmkay, so where is the IIS part? Did I miss something or is the article just mis-titled?
Here is one plugin which can help you in optimization: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/performance-optimization-order-styles-and-javascript/
IIS ?
– so we’ll take a look at what you can do, given certain common restrictions, and assuming your host runs PHP and Apache.
Hi sixside. The article’s title doesn’t suggest that it should contain any IIS-specific info. Categorizing it was tricky though, as it touches on a lot of technologies, from CSS and JavaScript to PHP and Apache. We decided to stick it in “Apache & IIS Configuration”, but it would have been a square peg in a round hole regardless of the category we chose.
I know from a relevance standpoint it makes sense to write to the lowest common denominator, but another article targeted at people using shared hosting and PHP? Eesh. I think some of us would be interested in how Sitepoint does its optimizations or tips and tricks for owners of dedicated servers. I went through Yahoo!'s recommendations and found ways to implement them myself, but I’m still interested in more fine-tuning, especially for Apache configuration.
Right now my sites are setup to pull content from a separate domain running lighty, but beyond that and putting scripts at the bottom of the page I would really like to know about low-level tweaks so I know how best to setup future servers.
A good elaboration on the Yahoo! rules regardless.
For JavaScript and CSS minification, I warmly recommend using the YUI Compressor, available at <a href=“http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/”>http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/</a>.
For quick modifications and order, I use to have css styles in different files, for example, the general ones in a file called general.css, the ones that affects only to forms in forms.css, etc. I think I’ll have to rethink this reading this article. What do you think?
Thank you.
You can have css code in different page but use only file called style.css to load all the different of them:
<code>
@import ‘lib/reset.css’;
@import ‘lib/typography.css’;
@import ‘lib/grid.css’;
@import ‘lib/forms.css’;
</code>
You can use Ant or Phing to parse style.css, merge the different css files and minify the result each time you need to update your website.
That way you don’t need to merge all the files each time you want to text some changes.
You can do the same with your js files: one js file that dynamically add all the other js files (like what scriptaculous do).
Great article but there is a typo on the last page with the sub-heading ‘Place Scripts at the Top of the Page’ under the CSS Optimisations heading. It should obviously be ‘Place Styles at the Top of the Page’.
Thanks for pointing that out Ryno. All fixed.
Interesting article. For some reason, though, adding the ‘FileETags none’ line to my .htaccess file just causes a 500 Internal Server Error… Has anyone else had this problem? Any thoughts on how to fix it?
On the topic of “Host Assets on Different Domains but Reduce DNS Lookups”, what do you suggest for people running http/https sites?
besides buying 3 ssl certs… 
Good article, lot of useful information, thanks
I’m using that way, using one file and @imports inside of it, but if I leave it like that, it would be 5 requests anyway.
I’m using ASP, not PHP, so I don’t have access to use Ant or Phing. What do they can do? Merge everything into one file automatically?
Another question, would www.domain.com will be considered different than domain.com? (for the purposes of hosting different assets in each domain)
Thank you
good
A great article on the topic!
FileETags none is wrong.
It should be FileETag none
Disable ETags ?
You say it’s better to disable them without saying why and others say it’s a way to prevent the page from being downloaded more than once when the browser has the last version (http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs).
Give more on that…
Thanks. I’m always up for reading.
Great article. Some good stuff in there. A lot of designers don’t realize that putting all of your JS files into one file sometimes saves users a second worth of loading.
Keep em coming!