Step by Step guide to speed up your VB4 OR VB3
 

There are several steps to improve your page loading speed. I will go over a few steps that will improve your site's loading time.

Step 1: Tweak your htaccess.
Open the htaccess file in your forum root and add the following below any url rewrite rules you may have from:
Vbulletin 3 or 4 with VBSEO installed
VB4 Forum Classic
VB4 Suite
VB3 by itself

This covers the following Pagespeed Rules.

Leverage browser caching
Specify a cache validator
Enable gzip compression

Make the following changes in your admincp

This helps to cache nearly any file type that you may add in your attachment options (if you allow people to upload music files, zip files, rar files etc.. see the list lol)

*some people report login problems, I have posted below what works for me. Be sure to do this step as well to avoid problems!!
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=267588#3

Browse to the bottom of this first post for the .htaccess code.

Step 2: Optimize images
There is no more need to do this for vb4 packages unless you wish to do this on other images such as avatars, custom buttons, attachments, gallery uploads etc.

This covers the following PageSpeed Rules:

Optimize Images

If you have access to Visual Studio 2010 (grab the trial edition here which should be compatible with the addon), you can complete this step in just a few clicks using this addon
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.micr...77c3?SRC=VSIDE

You can also use pnggauntlet which will compress images as well.

This is great to use on new skins/themes and also non animated gifs for Smileys, Signatures, Photo Album & Group Images and Avatars that your forum stores on your server!

Please note that both of these methods produce lossless images, meaning that even though it uses various methods to decrease file size there is absolutely no visual loss in quality of the image.

For non-windows users, I suggest Imageoptim & Trimage

If you have alot of jpeg images, you can compress 10 per day with this jpegmini. Your other options with this tool are to upload jpegs to a jpegmini album which will compress the images for free which you can download soon after! Your other option is to buy the tool for $20, which will enable you to compress a unlimited amount of jpegs, although it won't compress images above 28 MegaPixels.



Optional Step 3: Add CSS Sprites.
Not compatible with VB3

This covers the following PageSpeed Rules:

Combine images using CSS sprites

Optional Step 4: Use a CDN
Below are 3 free CDN's. I can vouch for cloudflare but have yet to try incapsula.

1) Incapsula
2) Cloudflare *Disable the Rocketloader feature to avoid potential issues.
New article on how to setup your forum for HTTPS with cloudflare

(Optional) Step 5: Make a free Server Optimization request

Now that you've done all of the steps above, there is one final thing left to do if you are using a vps or dedi, tweak the Server! You can go here to request a free tuneup:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...-configuration

Here's one additional trick to help improve your seo btw:
[SEO Enhancement] Replace "reload this page" to the thread title [v1.00]

Enjoy!

Optional (Recommended) Step 7: Lazy load images.

Lazy Load will delay the loading of images outside of viewpoint to make the page load faster. That is, images in the visible part of the web page are only loaded and remaining images are loaded when visitor scrolls down the page, at some times it can even helps to save bandwidth.

Consider linking to us at http://video-game-chat.com/forum to help show your appreciation, since you'll be saving bandwith, reducing the loading time and thus keeping more visitors who visit your site. And impoving seo as google is now factoring in loading times into it's algorithms.

Test your page speed & yslow score's
If you would like to test your website and see what changes need to be made while you follow any part of this guide you can do so at several sites:

GTMetrix
Webpage Test
Pingdom

Here's a new htaccess that I've been testing, it's pretty solid so far. Simply throw in your url rewrite rules (for friendly urls).... this part may confuse people... they are usually located near the top of an existing htaccess file. Example of what rewrite rules look like...

Throw that in between the #add your friendly url rewrite rules below. lines and your set! Another identifier is to look to see if the threads, forums, members etc are being affected by any rules in the old .htaccess... if so.. throw that in and you should have no problems.

Just a quick note, for the .htaccess, starting in 4.1.5
becomes

Fixing login issues with vbulletin 4.

After you apply the htaccess in the first post, proceed to do the following:

Disable vbulletin content caching (since apache is handling that now)

AdminCP > Options > Server Settings and Optimization Options > Disable Content Caching: Set to yes

*Note these changes did not show immediately for me but they did show that they were working for me after roughly 15 minutes.

Maybe rephrase that to only remove it if you haven't added any custom CSS.

True, most people however are unaware of it's presence.

Thanks, will be keeping an eye on this article, I just started tweaking my htaccess file for cache and wanted to look into compression as well.

Question though:
What is this and where does it display?

Also does this require enabling mod rewrite friendly urls? in the admin control panel

That set's the etags.

And this part identifies what set it (can be changed) Header set X-Powered-By
Run a test at http://gtmetrix.com, click timeline, expand an element and you will see details about that request including X-Powered-By

No, it doesn't require enabling friendly urls in the admincp. You can still take advantage of the seo friendly urls by selecting this option in your admin cp.

Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs

I think the caching of javascript doesn't play well with the login systen, in Firefox4 and IE9.

People will log in, it'll display the thank you for logging in, and then they will come back to a page that appears to have them not logged in. Either the caching or the compression not sure which.

Chrome seems to be unaffected

Hi crotan, is this with vb supercharged installed or did you install the htaccess only? I would have to say caching is the issue here imho.

just the htaccess on post #3, since I'm on 4.1.5

Try removing these lines from it

AddType application/x-javascript .js
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A31536000

Also, change this line

<FilesMatch "\.(css|js|CSS|JS)$">

to
<FilesMatch "\.(css|CSS)$">

Seem to still have issues, I took out

This is now only.
from the original

But still this htaccess interferes with the login of users on IE and Firefox :/

ok. At least now we know that caching isn't the issue here. Actually... first... I want you to clear your browser cache and try again with those lines removed.

Clearing the cache on IE9 (CTRL-R) and on Firefox 4 had no affect.

So something else is interfering?

Hi, I managed to login as avalanch on firefox 6 over there and didn't experience those issues.

Just tested with IE9, no problems.

Tested with my vb 4.1.3 boards with no htaccess rules removed. Managed to login fine with IE9 & Firefox. (use firefox all the time anyways lol)

firefox 5? 4?

Hmmm when you login does the login at the top of the page say Welcome Avalanch, and give you the notification, My profile, settings, Logout?

or stay on the Login, username and password box?

After I login with firefox, I get redirected to the page and won't be logged in but If I refresh I will be.

It's a little wonky.

For instance, If I logout on the forums, but then go to the CMS tab, it will display as If I were still logged in

Hi, go to http://tinychat.com/avalanch07 and I'll setup a cam so you can check out whats going on with the login on my side using firefox 6 & ie9


------------------------------------

It's been verified on my end (via tinychat) that this is not an issue with any tips that I provided.

I had to remove the caching of several elements to get mine to work without causing a wonky logout and login for IE, and Firefox, I'll have to do more extensive troubleshooting to see exactly what it was, and will report later after I narrow it down.

It's pretty interesting that it didn't happen on my end, only on yours.

I've done Step 2 with Cloudflare CDN instead of using supercharged. Supercharged just causes problems.

Do not activate Rocket Load on Cloudflare though.

Step 4 United Forum Sprites actually slowed my site down.

I'll try Step 3 later.

--------------- Added [DATE]1312062709[/DATE] at [TIME]1312062709[/TIME] ---------------

Step 3, you have to create a new domain and cname entry right? That's what page speed and webpagetest.org is telling me. It's telling me to put my whole images folder there.

Step 3 deals with reducing the total KB of images & what kind of problems did supercharged cause?

Thought I'd chime in with a note/tip - just be careful when implementing all this solely via .htaccess. If you have VPS or dedicated server you may already have some of the optimisations configured and setup directly via httpd.conf or httpd.conf include files (i.e. in whm/cpanel) which is the more optimal way of implementing these optimisations.

More online tools and tests for you to check your progress posted on my personal blog at http://vbtechsupport.com/388/

HTH

George

Hi, how to use with vbseo?

I don't have vbseo so I can't inform you much about that.

You will want to use vbseo's friendly url rewriting code in the htaccess instead of the one posted here though. So in your case, copy the contents of the htaccess file into the htaccess that vbseo creates. Remove the following code from it and save. I don't believe vb supercharged plays well with vbseo but I'm not sure.

How do you prevent static images from using cookies? I keep failing this in webpagetest.org.

Proper cookie usage: 40/100

I believe for that step domain sharding removes the cookies. I'll have to post back after I look it up a bit more.


YSlow recommends:

To work around this problem, make sure that static components are requested with cookie-free requests by creating a subdomain and hosting them there.

If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies.

In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free.

Yahoo! uses yimg.com, YouTube uses ytimg.com, Amazon uses images-amazon.com and so on.
http://developer.yahoo.com/performan...ml#cookie_free

I believe from what I've been reading is that if your forum is in the root, then it sharding won't work (because the cookies affect any subfolders within, just like a htaccess does to folders if it's set at the root). Cookies will still be delivered. If you make a folder for your forum and move it there to like /forum, then the subdomain sharding would work to prevent cookies.

It would. You can setup a 301 redirect for google and your visitors though. Within 3-4 month's you should be getting less & less crawl errors/redirects. Personally, I would mass message your members about the change or announce it, then go for it. Or register a new domain.

Damn.

--------------- Added [DATE]1312165937[/DATE] at [TIME]1312165937[/TIME] ---------------

By the way I used that link you posted to optimize images and it made my first byte time faster. Thanks a lot man.

No problem, it wasn't too hard to follow the way I explained it was it?

EDIT: Seems you could still use a few more optimized images
Optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 35.6KiB (57% reduction).

You must have dome something wrong. Appearing as question marks means it didn't find the image. Aka a 404 error.

What?

Sorry to say that, but how is optimizing images related to first byte time?

In rough the time adds up like this:
Sending http-request (timing should be similar to a ping) - your webserver (apache?) connecting to your php-system, your php system then will check whether the site can be served via your php cache or whether it has to compute everything new. For vbulletin: running the forum.php including all those database queries, takeing the output, go through the template - build the html page. And finally it goes to the user. At this point your webserver finally does know what images/html it has to send. Up until this point he does nothing and waits. So optimizing images does not influence the first byte at all. I would go for statistical fluctuation here.


You can speed up that process by using a web accelerator (varnish for example). With this it would go like that: http-request goes in, web accelerator sends cached page back. We would avoid all database queries and php compilation etc.
Since we can't really serve our users some cache data which does not check for their permissions, web accelerators can only used (not 100% true) for guests and crawlers.

But well guests and crawlers make up most of the traffic anyway, so varnish is a huge gain, really huge gain in speed and server load.

(web accelerator setup is pretty advanced and probably can't be explained in a simple how to - you need a tech admin who knows exactly what he is doing)

I installed and ran vboptimize, some parts of vbsupercharged, disabled plugins, optimized some images, got rid of apture, activated cloudflare, used some of their compression settings (except for rocketload and minimize javascript and html because they messed up parts of my site) and even ran united forum sprites and my first byte time remains an F. Forwarding this to my host so they can take a look. Thanks.

You can always try this plugin as well, to reduce cookies from javascripts, css & images. (just point the resources to a subdomain)

http://wiki.netdna.com/Implementation/vBulletin

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2011/08/121.png