Having read High Performance Web Sites, I figured I’d take a little time out of the development of new features on my side project to look at some basic performance issues. The first stop was YSlow, the Firefox plugin that works with Firebug to give you a simple report on how you rate on the Yahoo! performance scale. Mine being a tiny site, the report before any optimizations was decent but not great. There was definitely room for improvement so I figured I’d put some of the advice I’ve read recently into practice.

The first optimization was very easy. I made sure my images were sufficiently cached by adding a quick .htaccess file in the directory where my images are stored on the server. I saw 2 different techniques for doing this. One was based on file extension, such as the technique discussed here. The second was based on the file’s content-type, which was discussed here. On the margin the one based on content-type seemed a safer bet. That way if I have a file that’s incorrectly named it will still get cached.

The next step was to try to improve my JavaScript and CSS includes. As mentioned in High Performance Web Sites, the files should be minimized in order to save bandwidth. They should have far future expires headers so that the browser doesn’t request them after the first visit. And the number of includes should be limited so that there’s fewer requests that need to be made. Luckily someone much smarter than I already developed just about the perfect solution to all those issues and more. The Minify library for PHP is one of those pieces of code that does exactly what I was hoping it would do in exactly the way I was hoping it would. And to boot it required as little effort to integrate into my existing code base as could reasonably be expected. I recommend that anyone running even a small site on their own take a look at Minify. There’s absolutely no reason not to be using this wonderful little library. None. Go out right now and do it.

There was one snag in process of integrating Minify with my project. As I’ve mentioned, I’m using the CodeIgniter framework. It turns out that Minify and CodeIgniter needed a little bit of coaxing to work together, but nothing that got too messy. I’m going to leave that discussion for my next post, which will hopefully not take 4 months to write 🙂

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