You should mention earlier in your post that you’re talking about WordPress and in a case of a personal blog. PHP is great, but for maximum performances, again for a blog, from my point of view there are no secrets: buy a personal host, use a CMS which publishes static html files, use only dynamic languages for specific stuffs (ex: contact form data ), and work deeply with a team of engineers to customize the whole set.

I think WordPress won’t provide js or css compress tools. Not because they don’t want, because it’s just a market / business reason. It’s a kind of blog for ’7 to 77 years old’. If tomorrow wordpress requires 100 items, at least gzip, curl, imagemagick or some extras stuffs, i don’t think it will be welcomed. WordPress is using addons, so the community answer will probably be an addon for servers which support gzip for example.

If you like Yahoo! stuffs, you should take a look at “Sprite Me” from Steve Souders – http://spriteme.org. This google tech talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNfRL-TwzZY introduces Browserscope & SpriteMe. You will like it.

I read you on *Nuts sites but there is a lack of technical reviewers. Public are from beginners to expert. Please ask your truely colleagues / friends to review your articles. Shure next time you will update lots of stuffs you didn’t think about. If you already do it, well keep it going :)

Last feedback: most of the time you like linking internaly to your post. Why ? SEO ? Please provide clearly links to the original website’s tool (pngcrush, etc…) and additional links to any tutorials are welcomed too as well as a few lines about the license please: you’re talking about open source. It seems your reputation is growing on internet, so keep your blog the smart way :D Nobody said evangelizing in a public place is easy.

Cheers and thanks ! ! !

I’m talking from real-world experience. As long as your resources are under 300kb or so and are cacheable, then the server, cache and database are what you should be looking at. In the case of this blog especially with > 1.2s going to the actual page, which could be cut down to under 500ms.

Stuff like GZipping, CSS sprites, concatenated and minified scripts are still useful though in extreme circumstances or if you target users with slow connections.

“I need to twists BSA’s arm into Gzipping their resources to speed up downloading of those files. BSA implementing GZipping would help out thousands of websites.”

Please do so. It does seem to take awhile to load sometimes. Gzip’ing it would be a big help. :)

And sure… using local cached versions with a 2 day expire time will be faster. but then you have to deal with how to change everything when you modify your CSS file slightly. Etag headers resolve all that and for the life of me I can’t figure out why they aren’t used more.

@Darkimmortal
suuuuuuuure it does….

Curious to know what troubles you’ve seen when compressing and delivering compressed versions of CSS and JS via PHP. We’ve been using a modified version of the script called Combine (http://rakaz.nl/code/combine) for a while across a number users and browsers with no issues.

It basically grabs all your JS files, combines them, Gzips it and caches the combined file on the server until the script sees a change in the files then it refreshes the cache. Works like a champ.

I think the issue with a WP solution is that all plugins hook their CSS and JS differently.

It caches the resulting consolidated files and offers some decent options, such as exclusion.

@Walsh: You can certainly use PHP to combine and compress all the JS and CSS, but I find it causes more trouble than it’s worth.