We are starting with a set of product screencast to help users with product tuning. The most important features will be described in step-by-step manuals.
Here is the first one - JavaScript / CSS files merging tuning.
All screencasts will be available on our website - www.webogroup.com/home/site-speedup-joomla/video/
A lot of minor usability and accessibility (both in administrative interface and application core logic) is this release. More info:
try-catch envelope (which reduces a bit performance, so it can be disabled).Download the latest WEBO Site SpeedUp or update from the product.
Last builds of WEBO Site SpeedUp include amazing client side optimization approach - CSS Sprites for HTML images. Let's review underneath logic and all related techniques.
Actually we are speaking about combining images to a larger one which can be positioned with CSS property background-position. It's impossible to convert raw HTML images to CSS Sprite (to be correct - it's possible but leads a lot of restrictions and drawbacks, i.e. we will have to drop a huge part of images' functionality and properties).
So before any actual operations with images in HTML code (like <img src="..." />) we should prepare them. How? We should convert all images to 'fake' ones - transparent stubs which have initial image as a background, and the same width and height.
Well. To reduce amount of data (we are going to speed up website, not to increase its load speed) we should choose very efficient approaches to insert transparent stubs. And we have 2 choices:
data:image/gif;base64,R...Ow==. A bt more data (with gzip usage - about 100 bytes for 1 HTML document, or nothing). But minus 1 HTTP request (cool!).To provide the best practices here we can combine both approaches - for IE7 and lower use the first one, for all the other browsers - the second one.
It seems now we have all parts for HTML Sprites logic and can reveal it.
no-repeat and zero background position), width and height.All this looks very simple. But what are drawbacks?
As far as we need to check size for any image (just to get its dimensions an skip it if it's very large) - we will have a lot of I/O requests with any HTML document. So this can significantly increase server side load time. That's bad. But we can cache calculated dimensions for known images (such dimensions are being changed very rarely) - and skip all future recalculations.
But with every HTML document (with cached calculated dimensions) we have one more expensive CPU operation - CSS background positions calculation (even with completed CSS Sprite we need to get actual positions of given images inside it). But good news here is that we can also cache such calculations (to a set of CSS rules for given HTML image).
Also we must have per-page or per-website modes. Just because you can have thousands of small images through the whole website - but you don't want your visitors to download them all at once.
With all such approaches HTML Sprites technique works both on a high-end servers and weak VDS/shared hosting. And reduces by 20-30% number of HTTP requests for every your web page. That's really amazing. And it's ready to use - just download WEBO Site SpeedUp or update to the latest version.
New version with HTML Sprites support and more performance.
We didn't stop with product improvements, and after major 1.0 release continued to make it better. So here is a scheduled 1.0.1 update.
Download the latest WEBO Site SpeedUp or update from the product.
After 2 months of creating, tuning, and polishing of the new interface, old and new bugs resolving and general compatibility improving we have released version 1.0 of this outstanding application to speed your website up.
Also we have released our new corporate website (formerly web-optimizer.us) to allow wide range of website acceleration products and services - www.webogroup.com.
Here are few words about new features in 1.0 (in comparison to 0.9.7).
Get the latest WEBO Site SpeedUp or update it from internal interface.
WEBO Site SpeedUp increased efficiency of Russian charity fund - "Happy World".
WEBO Site SpeedUp is a wholesome product to speed up a website. There can be not enough time to tune hosting environment, sometimes you need any solution out of the box - that's about us. And it's much easier to have only one module to optimize website performance than apply handy changes to CMS or web server.
Children's charity fund "Happy World" (www.hworld.ru) was created in 2005. The foundation raises funds and provides assistance to children with serious illnesses. Only the last year 199 children received the necessary treatment at $2.6 million. Wards fund are children from poor families. They want to get well and together with their peers go to kindergarten, to school. Strong, reliable adult hand help to cope with the seemingly insurmountable problems, - says about fund activity Olga, its coordinator.
Geography of the project is quite broad - it covers the whole Russia territory. For this reason site of a charity fund for the last few years changed 6 hosting providers, which were periodically unable to bear the load. And now the website uses a distributed hosting from Media Temple (virtual hosting on the "clouds") with Joomla! + Apache + MySQL.
Average load on www.hworld.ru is about 20k unique visitors a month. But during the fund-raising campaigns it can increase several times. Once a campaign to raise funds for the treatment of one of our wards began, - says Michael, a fund technical specialist - and there were more than 8 000 unique visitors per day. It was necessary to accelerate the website load time for visitors and fit a dedicated hoster power. Due to the rapid increase in attendance it urgently needed to optimize Joomla! CMS. There was chosen the product for the universal website acceleration to achieve this goal - WEBO Site SpeedUp.
As Michael says, after the installation WEBO Site SpeedUp reduced consumption of GPU (unit of measurement of power consumption which is used in Media Temple). This allowed to fit the provided power and not to overpay for a non-optimized site. There have been indications that the site was being loaded faster. Both the first and returned visits were speeded up with competent caching. Latter is extremely important for the fund - there are a lot of regular visitors, and it is a huge benefit for them - fast website load speed and website stability.
What is the most important thing - in the most tense moments for the host when a child's life hangs in the balance, and is going active raising for medical treatment, we are confident that the site is working as quickly as possible, saving the lives of children - concludes Michael.
Website load speed is connected not only with the robust website performance, but also with the confidence of visitors to the website information. For charity fund the last fact leads the priorities list. And if there is any possibility to increase confidence of visitors to the charity - you need to do it now, do not fish or cut bait. Because the child's life depends on the decision about donation.
