First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.
Faster website means more revenue and traffic:
Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales (source: Greg Linden, Amazon).
Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches (source: Marrissa Mayer, Google).
Yahoo!: 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5–9% increase in the number of people who clicked “back” before the page even loaded (source: Nicole Sullivan, Yahoo!).
It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me.
I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.
Last week I changed my hosting provider from Site5 to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
NFSN is a lot more cheaper (I only pay for what I really use).
So in order to speed up my site and save bandwidth (the more I use the more I pay) I use .htaccess file to gzip my text based files and optimize cache HTTP headers.
Although this site is powered by Wordpress which has some really great plugins to optimize PHP output I wanted a more generic solution which can be applied to all PHP web applications.