Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, How-Tos

Speed up your site with PHPSpeedy

by Christina Warren (RSS feed) Feb 1st 2008 at 5:30PM

Leon Chevalier of Aciddrop.com has just released a free script that can considerably speed-up your website or blog's load time. PHPSpeedy works by making fewer HTTP requests, adding a far-future expires header, Gziping page components and minifying Javascript, CSS and HTML.

The end results are pretty stunning, in Chevalier's test (available at his site), a 271 KB page with 14 requests took 4.44 seconds to load. The same page after the modifications weighed in at 49 KB and just 4 requests, for 1.1s load time.

The latest version of the script includes an installer process that makes enabling the script on your own website for blog very, very easy. We tried it on our own WordPress installation and found the results to be as advertised and the installation process to be worry free.

For more specific WordPress 2.3.x instructions, follow us after the jump.
For WordPress 2.3.x users, installing and enabling the script is very easy.

  1. All you need to do is download PHPSpeedy and extract the file.
  2. Using your favorite FTP or SSH program, upload the php_speedy folder to the same directory as your WordPress installation (which for many people is their root directory, but if you have say a /wordpress directory on your web server, make sure you upload to that location).


    3. Upload the php_speedy folder to your WordPress directory

  3. After uploading the folder, point your browser to http://www.yoursite.com/php_speedy and follow the on screen instructions.
  4. After selecting the optimization options (the default is to enable everything), you will be given two lines of code to insert at the very beginning and the very end of the index.php file that you use for your current theme.
  5. You can use either the WordPress Dashboard or your favorite editor to alter this file. If you use the Dashboard, go to Theme Editor under Presentations and select the Main Index Template for the theme you are using on your site. If you are using FTP, the file is located in the /wp-content/themes/theme-name/ directory.

    6. Insert the first bit of code BEFORE <?php get_header(); ?>


    Insert the second part of the code at the very bottom of the page
We recommend you make a back-up of your entire theme folder before applying the changes to your index.php file, just in case something goes wrong.

For most users, this should be it, your WordPress site should be considerably faster.

Tags: phpspeedy, speed up blog, SpeedUpBlog, wordpress