Full On Design

Decrease loading times via .htaccess

About the Author

Mike Rogers is a Web Developer who is currently at University studying Web Technologies. He also is the founder of Full On Design. He has several years experience freelancing and you can follow him on Twitter (Rogem002).

Here is a really nifty trick I’ve been using for a while to decrease the time a page takes to load. Add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file:

FileETag none # Turn off eTags
<IfModule mod_expires.c> # Check that the expires module has been installed
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType application/x-unknown-content-type "access plus 10 years"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 10 years"
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>  # check if gZip support has been installed
mod_gzip_on         Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk    Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file          \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler       ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^text\.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime      ^image\.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>

This quick and easy method tells the user to cache files which are unlikely to change for 10 years (feel free to change the amount of time) and HTML for 1 second. It also turns off eTags.

Update: I also added a another piece of code I use which turns on Gzip, which reduces the amount of bandwidth required to transfer a file.

Posted April 15th, 2009