Google Pagespeed

TransAmDan

Forum Admin
Staff member
Over the last week, well probably a bit longer, but mainly in the last week I've been wanting to speed up the website/forum. Trouble is the Vbulletin code that the forum run with is quite versatile, so where it soo flexible to allow plugins its not really optimised for speed.
I'm keen to make the website rank high in Google search, for this to work the pages not only need to have decent content, the page title can help. So VB SEO has been installed for many years, this basically changed the website name to something readable this is called URL Rewrite, else the page would be called something like forum.php?t=10, which isn't too nice. The next thing google likes to see is fast pages. This is a challenge. There is soo many things that effect it, some are beyond control unless large chunks of the forum are re-written. Moving to another forum would be a challenge and reveals its own sets of problems no only converting the database to the new forum type.
The Articles section is the CMS content management system by vBulletin, some of this is quite bad in the sense of picture rezising, pictures are served full size and your browser is shrinking them to fit. so its sending a very large image, every byte sent is time, so to make the pages faster the images need to be smaller to start with.

Analysing the using Google Pagespeed Insights Solent Renegades Car Club page.

Optimize images

Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data.


Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

Your page has 9 blocking script resources and 3 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.



Enable compression

Compressing resources with gzip or deflate can reduce the number of bytes sent over the network.


So its quite poor, this is one of the worse pages due to the size of the images in the CMS not being served as thumbnails. also there is some Javasctipt that blocks the browser from rendering the page.

Google Pagespeed do a plug in for the server, which runs on top of of the Apache web server.

Turing page speed on., I now get this results in the page analyzing.

Analysing the Solent Renegades Car Club page.
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

Your page has 3 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.


Leverage browser caching

Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network.

Reduce server response time


  • In our test, your server responded in 0.53 seconds. There are many factors that can slow down your server response time. Please read our recommendations to learn how you can monitor and measure where your server is spending the most time.


So a lot less warnings, and no errors. So Google Pagespeed has certainly made a difference. Followed the download instructions. I'm running Centos 64 Bit

Once installed I let it run for a day. Before making any changes.
 
Then edited the pagespeed.conf
vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf

I kept most things as default, but as the web server is a dedicated one with 4Gb of RAM, 512Mb of memchached I could increase some of the memory areas. Below are some changes/additions if not already defined in the file.

ModPagespeedMemcachedServers localhost:11211
ModPagespeedCreateSharedMemoryMetadataCache "/var/cache/mod_pagespeed/" 102400

ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_images,inline_images,recompress_images,resize_images
ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_javascript,rewrite_css
ModPagespeedEnableFilters collapse_whitespace,elide_attributes
ModPagespeedEnableFilters combine_javascript
ModPagespeedEnableFilters outline_css,outline_javascript
ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_style_attributes
ModPagespeedEnableFilters prioritize_critical_css
ModPagespeedEnableFilters resize_mobile_images,inline_preview_images
ModPagespeedEnableFilters sprite_images
ModPagespeedEnableFilters defer_javascript


ModPagespeedFileCacheSizeKb 102400
ModPagespeedFileCacheCleanIntervalMs 3600000
ModPagespeedLRUCacheKbPerProcess 1024
ModPagespeedLRUCacheByteLimit 16384
ModPagespeedCssFlattenMaxBytes 2048
ModPagespeedCssInlineMaxBytes 2048
ModPagespeedCssImageInlineMaxBytes 2048
ModPagespeedImageInlineMaxBytes 8192
ModPagespeedJsInlineMaxBytes 2048
ModPagespeedCssOutlineMinBytes 3000
ModPagespeedJsOutlineMinBytes 3000



Once the edits are done, you need to restart the http.

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Check the Pagespeed cache by..
du -s -h --apparent-size /var/cache/mod_pagespeed/
 
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