Speeding Up Your PHP Web Site

By Quentin Zervaas, 24 May 2010 Amazon Google Page Speed PHP Yslow yuicompressor Download PDF (1 comment)

Summary

In this article we have looked at a few basic techniques for improving the performance of your web site.
First we looked at several browser-based tools, including Page Speed, Yslow and Smush.it. Next I briefly discussed using a Content Delivery Network for serving static web site content.
I then showed you how to reduce the size of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS using tools such as YUI Compressor and htmlcompressor. I then discussed caching of generated content using the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework.
Finally, I showed you how to automatically compress returned content either by using Apache's mod_deflate module or PHP's gzencode() function.
The great thing about the ideas mentioned in this article is that you can immediately see the improvement from implementing them, since you will receive higher scores in Page Speed and Yslow, and you will notice how much faster your pages load!

Resources

• Page Speed
• Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug
• Yahoo! Smush.it
• htmlcompressor
• YUI Compressor

Documentation

• Apache mod_deflate
• Zend_Cache Programmer's Reference
• PHP manual entry for gzencode()

Further Reading

• PhpRiot articles about Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 and Zend_Cache
• Beyond Gzipping (Tony Gentilcore, Google)
• Exception Performance (Yahoo! Developer Network)
• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site (Yahoo! Developer Network)
• Using Site Speed in Search Engine Ranking (Google Webmaster Central Blog)

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