With the new Web Fast action you can also speed up .html pages (after some editing the .htaccess file). However it doesn’t work for me.
First I tested if I edited the .htaccess correctly, so I included a little PHP script on my .html page. That worked fine, so the script should work (even though the action window shows a message to change the extention to .php). When it didn’t, I did a test by creating three pages:
page.html (with Web Fast action)
page2.html (without Web Fast action)
page.php (with Web Fast action)
In Google’s page speed test, the two .html pages both scored 73 out of 100, while the .php page scored 81 out of 100.
I think the new Web Fast action doesn’t work yet for .html pages, or am I doing something wrong?
“In terms of overall performance I would say that adding this Action to your pages is good but possibly less beneficial if your pages don’t contain any other PHP. The header compression it uses relies on PHP to work so running your page through PHP first may, in fact, be slowing the pages down.”
Hi Marco,
Have you tried a speed test with the htaccess removed so the html pages don’t get processed by the PHP engine?
Your html pages are getting run through PHP prior to being served which will naturally slow them down if you’ve no PHP in the file worth processing. The compression technique used by Web Fast is worth it if the rest of you page is already using PHP and you want to try and speed things up a bit.
Can you share the URL of the site you are trying to optimise? Maybe there are adjustments to images, CSS files etc that would give you a better sped boost.
Regards,
Tim.
On 13 Jan 2013, at 00:22, Marco wrote:
In Google’s page speed test, the two .html pages both scored 73 out of 100, while the .php page scored 81 out of 100.
If I remove the htaccess, all three pages have a 73 score. My page doesn’t have any other PHP however there is a big text file of 260 KB included on the page. The combination of the Web Fast and the .php extension apparently have the best result (83 score in the test speed), even when there is no PHP on the page.
So I guess my best bet would be to use WebFast on the pages that contain such a big text file, use the Web Fast action and change the extension to .php? My other pages can have .html being the extension.
That may be true but Tim’s point is that there may be other factors - like image size - that should be addressed that might give you greater speed gains.
That is why he is suggesting you share your URL - so that we can have a look and maybe offer other advice.
If you dont want to post it publicly then both our email addresses are available in our entries on the People page.
Thanks Dave. Not sure what the ‘83 out of 100’ exactly stands for. (Is this great, or should my score be 95 or more?) My current website has a score of 52 so at least I’m heading in the right direction with the new website.
I appreciate that you and/or Tim would be willing to look at my page. Although I prefer not to make the page URL public, I’d be happy to share it with you and Tim through email. Thanks so much for helping me here!
My initial question was related to Web Fast in combination with the .html and .php extensions. The only difference between the pages is the extension, all other things (like images) are exactly the same. I was wondering why the Web Fast action doesn’t seem to work on the html page even when the html page is parsed as php. The .php page works great with Web Fast.
