Improve Your Website Speed Instantly!

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Website performance is much talked topic these days but still there are a surprisingly large number of webdevelopers that neglect the impact of site loading time for their SEO, visitor experience and most importantly sales.

Here is a quick tip to improve your website performance score (as

measured by YSlow). It takes literally less then 5 minutes to implement.

*Please note… If you are not confident editing your .htaccess file, contact me here and I will be happy to do it for you

Add these lines to your .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch “\.(ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$”>
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus 30 days”
</IfModule>
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
</FilesMatch>

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml text/javascript

What this does is adds far expires header (make sure mod_expires is loaded in your apache config if you have problems) to your static content (images, js, css), turns off ETag headers and compresses files sent to the browser.

This will improve your score by at least a full grade, if not more.

Of course, improving YSlow grade will be just a side effect – your  site will feel much quicker for browsing too.

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