Software by tag 'optimize'

7 Tools To Optimize The Speed of Your Website

December 15th, 2009 in Tools | 53 Comments

Google recently announced that it’s algorithm will factor in page load speed in addition to the other 200 or so ranking factors currently employed. This move, broadly welcomed by web developers and users, means it is now more important than ever to optimize the speed of your websites. Speed optimisation will not only keep Google happy, it will keep visitors engaged, increasing user retention and activity, as well as reducing your bandwidth and hosting costs. It’s a real win-win situation.

Using the tools explored below, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly what’s slowing you down as well as get advice and recommendations on how to make the necessary improvements. Each tool is slightly different, but you need not use them in isolation. The best results come from utilizing a portfolio of speed optimisation tools to ensure you’ve got all the bases covered.

Still remember the Wordpress web optimization article? If you are a Wordpress user, i believe both these articles will bring benefit to your blog’s loading speed, as well as your page rank.

Yahoo! YSlow

YSlow is perhaps the user-friendliest of all the speed optimisation tools, useful for beginners and experts alike. It analyses web pages and suggests ways to improve the performance of your web site based on Yahoo!’s 34 best practices. These are divided into seven categories: content, server, cookie, CSS, JavaScript, images and mobile.

YSlow, which is a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug (which you have to install first), judges web pages according to one of three pre-designed rule sets or a rule set of your own making. In addition to advising you on how to improve your web site’s speed it also summarizes each page’s components, displaying in-depth statistics.
Yahoo! YSlow

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7 Areas Of PHP You Might Want To Optimize

October 16th, 2009 in PHP, Tutorial | 21 Comments

PHP is undoubtedly one of the preferred development methods chosen by many to create dynamic web pages. As contents get bigger, there is a real need to manage our PHP codes so that it runs faster. Unfortunately for many beginners, designers and enthusiasts, making PHP codes run faster requires intricate knowledge of the overall infrastructure around PHP. It could be your Apache settings, your operating system, or even the memory of your machine.

But we can start from somewhere. Here are 7 areas of your own PHP code that you can modify for performance.

PHP static Keyword

Usage of the static keyword on functions is often programmer’s first choice for optimization. It allows methods within a PHP class to be accessed without the need to instantiate it.

<?php
class Foo {
public static function staticMethod() {
// put codes here
}
}
Foo::staticMethod();
?>

The process of instantiating an object is always expensive and as we can see here, the function staticMethod() can be called without creating a new Foo object. This optimization could lead almost up to 4 times speed improvement.
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12 Really Useful Image Optimization Tools For Web Designers

September 17th, 2009 in Tools | 37 Comments

Images are very important because they will make your web pages look nicer and more attractive. But, high quality and beautiful images always huge in file size. They make your pages load slower and consume more bandwidth. So we, the designers should optimize the images so that they are tiny in file size, but good in quality.

There are a lot of useful image optimization tools which can help us to optimize and reduce the file size of the images. These applications are available as both web-based and desktop-based applications.

Web based Image Optimization Tools

1. Smush.it

Smush.it is a popular image optimization tool that able to reduce the image file size but retain the quality, which is what we called “lossless” image optimization! You can run Smush.it through the web site (5 images at the same time) or through Firefox’s YSlow extension.
Smush.it

2. Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

The Online Image Optimizer lets you optimize different image file formats such as GIF, JPG and PNG. You can either upload the image from your local machine or paste the URL of an image. This tool able to optimize and convert your image to different file format. The limitations of the Online Image Optimizer are 200KB per file, and only single file allowed per conversion.
Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

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