Hi my website is running slow and i need to get it running faster - i am using joomla 1.5. just to give you a bit of information on my site which is http://www.in2town.co.uk it is a news and magazine website where it is updated each day. there are articles and news put on their each hour. So i am not sure i can have a long cache time.
i tried having a long cache time and tried other things as well but i found that when i put new articles on my site i had to refresh the cache on the site and refresh it on my computer, i was also finding that people visiting my site were not seeing the latest news as they did not refresh their computer cache.
i have found this but i am not sure it will work for me.
here is the information
acheable static resources, your site will appear to load much faster.
How to leverage browser caching
Find your .htaccess file in the root of your domain. I edited it with Notepad to add these lines of code below and save it (not as .txt).
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
This basically enables instructs the browser to cache different static resources like images, javascript, flash, pdf, and icons for the specified period of time. You can increase or decrease the values depending on your specific requirements. The more static or unchangeable your resource, longer the period you can enable browser caching. You can read more about the Apache Module mod_expires and how generation of Expires and Cache-Control HTTP headers instruct the client about the document’s validity and persistence.
i have a report on my site which is here http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.in2town.co.uk/Jw91LbT8
it says i need to
Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header
Defer parsing of JavaScript
Leverage browser caching
Specify image dimensions
Remove unused CSS
use efficient CSS selectors
Minimize redirects
ANy help and advice would be great