Since I moved to a self managed Rackspace Cloud Server. I’ve been forced to look at all the things that one would normally pay a shared hosting provider to manage. i.e. Security and Performance.

So after installing a roll-your-own Apache+Suexec+Mod_Security+MySQL+PHP environment I’m now in the optimisation market.

Enter Googles page speed plugin available for both Firefox and Chrome.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using_chrome.html#Installing

Discovering that my page load score was low at 60-70/100 I’ve been beavering away at getting it higher and I’m up to 90 but it’s becoming an obsession.

You have to enable gzip compression for both static and dynamic content. Enable Expires headers and do all sort’s of tweaks to get the page to load quicker and quicker.

I now am looking at things I’ve not really heard of CSS sprites and minifying (compress Javascript/CSS to remove the bloat of whitespace).

Anyway do look at the Google Page Speed plugins. You may be suprised at the many suggestions and links they point you to in order to speed up your web sites.