v1.0.5 released

Few compatibility and performance improvements in the new build of WEBO Site SpeedUp. List of changes:

• Page 'Cache' moved to 'System Status' tab (Cache). Now all information about cache files is located on System Status (what is more clear), and there is much less info (because huge blocks of information on the previous Cache page seemed not to be useful). We are working on complete Cache Manager tool (to re-create cache blocks for separate website sections / pages), but it will be a little later.
• Excluded 'Performance - Quick check' option. It's misconfigured in the most of cases, and actual performance gain was very little.
• Fixed minor compatibility issues. Some more environments now not caused 500 errors on switching between configurations.
• Improved minify for CSS files.
• Improved client side caching.
• Improved UI (minor fixes).

Update your WEBO Site SpeedUp or download the latest build.

WordPress Performance: Step-by-Step Every Day

We are going to completely review all sides of WordPress-based blog performance with a set of articles. For this purpose we created a simple blog on a shared hosting — www.speedingupwebsite.com — and every day there will be new articles about WordPress performance (both server and client sides).

We will review all possible plugins variations (on this website) and give you complete information how you can speed up your WordPress blog. No more '10/20/30/40+ tips about WordPress speeding up'. All information in one place. All failures and successes and all detailed manuals right here. And all of them will tested on a real website.

Keep tuned: www.speedingupwebsite.com or via RSS. If you have any ideas to cover in tests and comparisons - please share them in comments.

Version 0.6.3 released

Here we are with the latest version of wonderful performance optimization package:

• Added separated CSS resource file loading on DOMready event. This will force browser to render content while it is loading background images (in resource file).
• Added .htaccess functionality detection on CGI systems. Blog post about tricky Apache modules shows how complicated can be a simple task to detect server side features support. Now this is detected wherever possible.
• Added gzip and cache for fonts. After Steve's post about @font-face we added complete coverage for fonts files.
• Added support for gzip in static assets proxy library. Now it can be used as the "Furios Web Optimizer" - just add Cache / Gzip headers 'on fly' as fast as possible (no minify, static gzip support). There still is a place for improvement - i.e. add PHP Cache subsystems usage.
• Added 'cache version' option to skip cache files' mtime check. More about this option here.
• Added 'quick check' option to skip complete parsing of external files. More about this option here.
• Added 'skip RegExp' option to allow standard-complaint website be faster. More about this option here.
• Added textarea to set any CSS code over compressed files. Can help to rewrite some 'broken' styles quickly.
• Spot in title (lang="wo") made optional (in full version only). A number of people have been concerned about this spot and SEO influence. Actually there is no correlation, but now it can be made optional.
• Improved multiple hosts behavior in a few cases.
• Improved 'Separate CSS files' behavior (data:URI group of settings).
• And a few minor fixes.

You can always download the latest version of Web Optimizer from its download page.