Method One: Speed up WordPress by adding compression via .htaccess

This is my preferred and recommended method as it is a more comprehensive solutions and works either domain or server wide depending on your configuration.  This is also a more advance and difficult to implement method so if you do not understand what I am talking about you should probably skip this method.  The easiest place to add these directive are in the .htaccess fill though you can also add the directives to your vhosts.conf of your apache configuration.  Method one does not apply to Apache 1.x please do not try it unless you are using Apache2.

First you will need to enable both mod_deflate and mod_headers with Apache. This can be done in one of the following two methods.  Apache 2 uses mod_deflate which has some built in detection to determine whether and how to compress data for browsers.

You can enter the following commands on some systems including Debian and Ubuntu.

sudo a2enmod deflate
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

This will enable mod_deflate and mod_headers in the apache config and the the last command will reload the configuration.

You can also manually enable the mods by looking in your apache configuration files and locating where mod are configured (hint: look for lines similar to those below).  You can either ad the following two lines or uncomment them if they already exist.

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so

Again you will need to reload the apache configuration as above.

There are two option that for compressing outgoing content with apache2, compress specific content or compress all content except specified.  Choose one option only.

Option 1: Compress specific content

You can add type such as text/html, text/css, text/plain or even x-application/javascript.  See Webmaster Toolkit Mime Types for a simple but exhaustive list.

      #-- compress content with type html, text, css and javascript
      AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css x-application/javascript

        # correctly handle http requests that come from behind a proxy
        Header append Vary User-Agent

Option 2: Compress all content

Manually excluding specified file types such as images, zip files, pdfs, or other files that already have some sort of compression on them.  In this case you exclude file by their extension using regular expressions.

    # set filter mod_deflate (chooses gzip or deflate compression based on browser support) on all outgoing content
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    # exclude content that is already compressed or does not compress well via file type
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|rar|zip)$ no-gzip

      # correctly handle http requests that come from behind a proxy
      Header append Vary User-Agent

Additional Apache2 Directives

This directive should probably be added to properly handle old browsers that do not support compression.

    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Additionally you can add the following directives for additional logging

    DeflateFilterNote Input instream
    DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
    DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
    LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
    CustomLog logs/deflate.log deflate

Note: that the client browser has to request compression via headers sent on request and IE 6/7 will only request compression on .html, but not on .txt nor .css. Mozilla/Firefox/Chrome/Safari can handle all three types.  I am not sure about Opera or IE 8.

You should now test your site using various browsers and you can also check to make sure your are sending compressed content using the GIDZipTest page.

Method Two: Speed up WordPress by adding compression via PHP

If you don’t have the ability to modify you apache configuration files or .htaccess you can still try to get some compression by adding a small snippet of PHP code to your template.  This may work with Apache 1.x bu tI have not tested it.

This method is very simple to implement.  Open your header.php in the theme you are using and add the following line to top of the file or just above the <DOCTYPE! line.

That’s all.

Again you should test with various browser to make sure your site is working and you can use the GIDZipTest page to see if you page is being compressed.

Method Three: Speed up WordPress using a plugin

There are many plugins for WordPress that will combine, minify and compress your WordPress output.  I haven’t had much luck with any of them due to some quirks with this site but they may be the simplest way to save bandwidth and speed up WordPress.  I am not going to go into detail on how to use these plugins but I will merely list the most promising – those which other WordPress developers I know have used successfully to achieve that same results.

PHP Speedy - PHP Speedy can consolidate javascript and CSS and combining them all into two files, one for the javascript code and the other for CSS. It also minifies and compresses the combined files and caches them then removes all the javascript and CSS links in the <head> tag and serves the combined file from the cache to the readers.

W3 Total Cache – Increases you site’s performance  by using a variety of techniques including file caching, database query caching, minifying/combining/compressing files, content delivery network (CDN) integration and more.

Webo Site SpeedUp – This is a commercial plugin but it also have a free version that does quite a bit to speed up your site.  It is without a doubt the most configurable and the free version allows you to do file caching, minifying/combining/compressing files and more.  The commercial version gives you total control over optimizations ranging from the .htaccess tweaks listed here to various file and database caching methods.

Parallels Plesk

Ubuntu Linux

Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a PHP accelerator. PHP accelerators are extensions built to increase the performance and decrease the load time of software applications written using the PHP programming language. Most PHP accelerators work by caching the compiled bytecode of PHP scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling source code on each request. A PHP accelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of PHP code anywhere from 2-10 times.

APC is a free, open source accelerator that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory.

This should improve performance on both physical and virtual hosted machines. These instructions are aimed at Plesk users but should be easily adapted to any Debian based installation.

To install APC the first course of action you will need to take is enter the following command on your server:

sudo apt-get install php-pear php5-dev gcc apache2-threaded-dev

Once that has completed you should be able to run the following:

pecl install apc

You should see something like this:

downloading APC-3.0.19.tgz ...
Starting to download APC-3.0.19.tgz (115,735 bytes)
.........................done: 115,735 bytes
47 source files, building
running: phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20041225
Zend Module Api No:      20060613
Zend Extension Api No:   220060519
1. Use apxs to set compile flags (if using APC with Apache)? : yes

1-1, 'all', 'abort', or Enter to continue:

Hit Enter

Next you will need to enable the extension, use vi or nano or whatever your favorite text editor for Linux is.

sudo vi /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini

At the very minimum you will need to add the follow to the file:

extension=apc.so
apc.enabled=1
apc.shm_size=30

There are numerous options for APC so please see the following http://us3.php.net/manual/en/apc.configuration.php for details

Copy the apc.php file to your website:

sudo cp /usr/share/php/apc.php /var/www/vhosts/domain.tld/httpdocs

Edit the apc.php file and change the default username and password. These must be changed inorder to login to the APC control panel.

sudo vi /var/www/vhosts/domain.tld/httpdocs/apc.php

defaults('ADMIN_USERNAME','apc'); 			// Admin Username
defaults('ADMIN_PASSWORD','password');  	// Admin Password - CHANGE THIS TO ENABLE!!!

After that issue the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You should be good to go and APC should be running. To verify got to yourdomain.tld/apc.php.

PHP and GD. Little testing has been done with different versions of PHP. If you have PHP 5 with GD enabled you shouldn’t have any problems. PHP 4 currently has some issues but should be resolved in the next release of Facelift. A newer version of ImageMagick (6.3.7+) is required for the FancyFonts and QuickEffects plugins.

If GD is not installed on your server you will have to recompile PHP to include GD. If you are comfortable in WHM for cPanel, you can do that under the “Update Apache” tab (check the “GD” box). Check your settings carefully (especially the PHP version – cPanel may try to change it) before you hit build. Plesk and ISPConfig should have GD enabled by default. If you are not comfortable doing it yourself, ask your hosting company to do it for you. (Thanks Steve!)

Delete your existing version before installing this version

1. Extract to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Look in wp-content/plugins/facelift-image-replacement/facelift
3. Set the wp-content/plugins/facelift-image-replacement/facelift/config-flir.php to be writable (chmod a+w config-flir.php).
4. Set the wp-content/plugins/facelift-image-replacement/facelift/cache to be writable (chmod a+w /cache).
5. Add fonts of your choice to wp-content/plugins/facelift-image-replacement/facelift/fonts folder.
6. Make sure you have the `wp_footer()` call in the footer of your template See `/wp-content/theme/default/footer.php` for example.
7. Activate plugin in WordPress admin panel
8. Set FLIR configuration in the admin panel – config-flir.php must be writable for changes to take effect.
9. Customize tags for FLIR on FLIR submenu under the Design menu

Notes

• QuickEffect Plugin is not implemented yet
• SuperCache Plugin is not implemented yet
• If using a version older than 0.7 completely delete any old verions before upgrading as this plugin is under rapid development
• You cannot auto-upgrade from versions older 0.7.0
• Text remains intact in source so search engines see your page as text!