Jim,
I noticed that one of my JPGs was in the format src="alz.jpg" on a page of mine and not in the form src="http://www.mysite.com/alz.jpg" and appeared to take almost no time to come up in the browser. Is that coincidence or as far as speed of graphic loading using only the file name and extension(jpg) is faster for downloading. I remeber the problem of rouge bots stealing pages that don’t use the whole address. I’m not worried about bots copying my graphics.
Thanks,
Roger
/images/test.jpg has 16 characters
websecurity.mobi/images/test.jpg has 43 characters
There is no denying that there is a difference in the absolute vs relative url load time, however, it is minimal and as you mentioned, the absolute url will make it more difficult for people who try to grab your content.
Caching:
I’m not sure if your site is making a lot of calls to a DB, but if so, you should look at caching your content. I just did this on one of my newer WordPress sites and went from a 13 second load time to 2 seconds on pages with more than 300 comments on them – a serious increase in speed!
That speed also made an impact in total visitors as well – The site went from 10,000 uniques to 15,000 daily uniques which tells me people were leaving because of load time!
Better late than never, right
Regards,
Jim.
Unfortunately I don’t understand it.
….need a little help. (Lost the connection).
What does ‘calls to DB’ mean? Calls to the server?
Also, I just prevented browsers from caching my site, so what does ‘caching [my] content’ mean?
Thanks Jim,
Roger
Hi Roger,
When I say DB, I am talking about the Database. So, yes, calls to the Database server – For example; every comment on a blog is a query to the database asking if there is another post (or one hit grabbing all the comments and placing them in an array depending on the code).
BadSpiderBites.com for example has sections that have hundreds of posts. The server has to access the database and find all the comments people have left for that post, then write that text to the screen. A post with 500 comments could take up to 15 seconds to display on the screen and people are not going to wait that long (I don’t).
So, I cache my on site. In the case of my spider bite site which is a wordpress blog, I installed a plugin (these are free tools that enhance your site) that will take all the content from a dynamic page and place it into a static page.
By doing this, the dynamic page (which has to make calls to the DB to get comments, etc) only needs to run once. It then takes all the content and creates a page that has all the comments included which means no more calls to the database and faster load times.
This type of caching works for sites that have a lot of dynamic content.
This type of caching is also internal, meaning it all happens on your server before the outside world sees it. Internal caching is different than search engines caching your content and you can still cache internally while disabling search engine caching.
Regards,
Jim.
Jim,
Other than my edits, my site is really not dynamic (not chaning regularly). You wrote, "I’m not sure if your site is making a lot of calls to a DB, but if so.." The page doesn’t automatically load more than the page the visitor is on and the largest page is 50kbSo calls to the server, I would think, are equal to the number of visitors. Once the server finds the page and 0, 1, or 2 accompanying graphics, it doesn’t have to look for anything else, other than the HtAcess file and the CSS file.
For a static page, are you saying to consider cacheing the text of a page with its graphics? Or cache all of the text of the site with all of the graphics?
((I noticed that when I don’t use the whole address of a graphic (img src="heart.jpg") the graphic apppears at once (or pops up), but using the whole address (….) while loading the rest of the page, graphics appear incrementally.))
Thanks Jim,
Roger
Jim,
Can you cache just graphics? Would it speed up a website?
Thanks,
Roger
Jim,
I asked my webhost (BlueHost) about caching and they said to give their fast CGI option A try. You choose to turn on or not turn on certain features.
They have this feature to turn on and I did.
Ebnable Fast CGI
FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_phpsusexec. This eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpretor on every hit. Since it is always in memory ready for the next hit, the responses will be generated faster. NO MODIFICATIONS to your existing PHP applications will be performed so you can easily enable and disable it at will.
I turned this one on:
ENABLE Bluehost Dynamic Cache
Cache the output of all FastCGI applications to avoid having to process the page for every hit. This is recommended for sites that get frequent hits.
I turned this one on:
ENABLE Super Cache
Super Cache will immediately show expired content to the browser while regenerating the request in the background. This is recommended if you just want to show your pages lightning-fast to the browser and you don’t mind showing content older than the TTL (specified below).
And I set this one to 8 minutes (4800 sec)
TTL:4800
The Time-To-Live is the number of seconds to keep the cache before regenerating the page. Set low (around 10 seconds) if pages are very dynamic changing often and it is not acceptible to show content from an old page for very long. Set high (around 3600 seconds) if the pages take a long time or use excessive resources to generate or if there aren’t very many different pages to cache or if the pages are generally static and don’t change very often.
It seems to bring up my site faster. Is it helping just the two PHP lines I have, or is it doing more? Is this doing the caching we were talking about?
Do you know of any othere ways to speed up my site?
Thanks,
Roger
Your site came up fast for me and I think you have everything optimized – I can’t think of anything else right now. The ENABLE Bluehost Dynamic Cache is something I was not aware of.
But, in reviewing your site, I did discover that I need to start placing my toothbrush in hydrogen peroxide rather than just rinse it off! – all this time, I thought rinsing it off with water was good enough!
Best regards,
Jim.
Jim,
Thanks for all your help over the last 7 months.
Phase 1 is complete. I still need to PHP the left and right colums, maybe even the head. I’ll work on that next month.
All I have left is a shopping cart, I think I know what I want to sell, placement of ads on the site, and autodelivery of some information I want to sell with no copy and paste capability. I’ll have to give adsense another look, but if it slows my site down like Google Analytics I probably won’t use it.
Jim, don’t forget to use a little dish detergent on that toothbrush first. When you place your toothbrush in peroxide, make sure you don’t leave it in there 24/7.
Thanks,
Roger
When you are ready to try adsense, let me know and I’ll help on the placement.
As for the toothbrush – I almost did leave it in there last night, then thought better.
I like the brown tie for yellow teeth joke
Regards,
Jim.