Textpattern CMS is often used for websites where there’s a considerable amount of text content that needs to be managed for consumption on the front end. Page load times are important, especially with the prevalence of mobile browsers around the world. To that end, it’s often beneficial to reduce the amount of time it takes for your website pages to load in a browser. One of the ways this can be achieved is to deflate the text components of your site. In order to show you the difference in performance, I’m going to use an A/B example of before and after a deflate has been applied.
Before I do that, however, it’s important you know that the content of your pages, forms, articles and so forth will not be modified. The configuration change to enable deflation takes place outside the Textpattern interface. A hidden file in the root of your Textpattern installation called .htaccess is where changes will be made. This file can be edited on Arvixe Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting without any known issues. In the unlikely event a problem arises, you can quickly and easily undo the changes you made.
I’ll be checking the two main text components served from a Textpattern default installation: a rendered front page, and the associated CSS. Using Textpattern version 4.5.5, the file sizes reported in my browser are:
/ = 9.79KB /css.php?n=default = 26.71KB
This example uses an independent website – http://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ – to check for compression. Using the same 2 URLs from my browser test, they are reported by the compression test website as:
/ = 9.8KB /css.php?n=default = 26.7KB
Both about the same as my own browser and, crucially, both URLs are reported as not compressed. I can see that my browser is requesting compressed content if it exists, so I’m going to make life easier for everyone else using compression-aware browsers and deflate my text. If I apply the deflate configuration, the differences in size are considerable. The same website now recognises that both URLs are compressed, and reports much smaller file sizes:
/ = 3.3KB /css.php?n=default = 5.9KB
I’ll save you the calculations and tell you the good news: prior to deflation being enabled, the reported combined size of the two files was 36.5KB. Now, with some easily-copied text, it’s 9.2KB. There is inevitably some additional overhead in each A/B case, but the deflated version is approximately 25% of the size. The browser will inflate the deflated files, so the source code appears the same in both situations. Your users will be able to check if your content is compressed by looking in the browser inspector, should that kind of thing be important to them.
Here’s how it’s done. Make a safe backup of your existing .htaccess file, and then add the following lines to the end of the .htaccess on your site:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
You don’t need to reboot your server or do anything fancy – your Textpattern website will now be serving up compressed (deflated) text.
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In the .htaccess does the compressed deflated go after the closing tag or inside ?
Hey Kyle – great question. Technically it should go inside the closing tag that checks for mod_deflate, but as Arvixe servers have mod_deflate enabled it could also go outside the tag. Short answer: it doesn’t really matter. Recommendation: try inside the closing tag, and see how that affects the transfer in your web inspector.