Optimise Expression Engine. Some tips to dramatically speed up your Expression Engine site. Following some of the simple steps below should result in a big reduction in loadtimes for your site.
1 Turn off tracking
Admin > Security & Privacy > Tracking Preferences
2 Enable Gzip
Go to Admin > Output and Debugging Preferences. From here for the option: "Enable GZIP Output" - make sure that this is set to yes.
3 Cache Channel Queries
Go to Admin - Channel Administration > Global Preferences and set this option to yes. Pease note that you can only use this if you do not use future entries or expiring entries on your site.
4 Get rid of unused addons
Go to Add-Ons > Modules and uninstall/remove any unused add-ons
5 Take it easy on calls and embeds
For all templates, keep entry calls and embeds to a minimum. Variable and snippets may be the better option to reduce the page load.
6 Channel Entries
For all channel entries, make sure you disable what you are not using and set the cache the call. See the example below.
disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks" cache="yes" refresh="30"
7 Optimise. Optimise. Optimise
Optimise all media content on the site. Ensure all imagery and video is optimised. Use the developer tools plugin to review the total page size. CE image is an excellent tool for resizing images as needed within a template. In addition to resizing on the fly, it has many image manipulation features.
8 Cache
Turn on template caching. From the EE admin panel, go to Design > Templates > Template Manager. From here select the “Edit Preferences” option for your selected template and set the caching to "Yes" along with the required time.
Other that EE’s inbuilt caching, you could also use a plugin such as CE Cache.
Leverage your browser caching too via htaccess - setting an expiry date for static resources will ensure previously downloaded resources will be sourced from local disk rather than over the network.
9 Minify
Minifying both both your CSS and JS code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. For JS that is called on all pages, look to combine it into one file to reduce the number of server requests.
10 Compression
Enable compression on your server. This can be done via htaccess and can result in a reduction is file size by over 80%.
