Board Optimization - United-Forum CSS Sprites - ludicrous speed - NOW!

tl;dr Makes your forum faster.

Want an easy one-click installation for this addon? . Vote for this jira-entry

Add on currently is in beta stage

When visiting a website, speed is a very important factor not only for users but crawlers as well. Long loading times are a nuisance since your time is basically wasted during the waiting period. Hence, we are trying everything we can in order to speed up our site. One great way to improve loading times is by the use of css sprites. Unfortunately these are not implemented by vBulletin.

We therefore decided to develop our own css-sprite add on for vBulletin boards and want to share this code with the worldwide vBulletin community.

Live demo

The add on is permanently running in our vBulletin board ( > 2.000.000 posts), take a look:
http://www.united-forum.de

The add on will be supported via this thread. If you have any questions, issues, improvements or feedback regarding this add on, please feel free to post a comment or write us a pm at any time. We are happy to discuss

vBulletin performance using css sprites

Our tests are based on version 0.7.0. We used the analytic tools firebug network utility and the googlelabs.com page speed site

on the client side the following parameter were used:
download speed: 5.7 MBit/s
ping: 31ms

css sprites - what are they?

The intention behind css sprites is the bundling of many small graphics into one large graphic in order to decrease the number of required http requests. This shortens the loading times of the given website. In addition, the the accumulated size of all small graphics is higher than the size of the sprite due to reasons of compression.
You can find further information in a great article by Chris Coyier.

What is the gain in using css sprites?

Aside from the technical implementation, the question on how much one actually does gain by using css sprites is of the most interest. Obviously they decrease loading times - but how important are small loading times and what is the impact on vBulletin overall loading times?

A short time ago, Jasper Aguila pointed out that speed is one crucial stickiness factor in his blog on vBulletin.com.

Originally Posted by Jasper Aguila vBulletin Support

The internet has unfortunately contributed to the exponential decrease in attention span for many individuals. That's why this decade is seeing a trend in emerging technologies emphasizing the importance of speed request. It's crucial for your content to be promptly distributed in a timely manner, else bounce rate will increase - making you lose returning visitors. It's also important to note that slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

With better browsers, more powerful processors, and improved technologies constantly releasing each year, it's becoming quite difficult to provide excuses for slow loading pages. Therefore, try optimizing your server for speed. Read up and learn optimization techniques at vBulletin.com's Server Configuration forum.

In addition, the google ranking is influenced by the site speed as well.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Originally Posted by 09.04.2010 - Google Webmaster Central Blog

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

vBseo Webmaster Mert G?k?eimam

CSS sprites is a huge bonus for big boards , any big board owner definately should use it.

Last but not least, not only the user's loading time is reduced, but also does the server load decrease as the server will have to handle a lot less of http requests. This clears available connections and cpu time.

Add on features

In the current released beta version 0.7.2, sprites are available for FORUMHOME and FORUMDISPLAY. Coming up next SHOWTHREAD.

Sprites are created style based for all forum styles and saved in a folder which you can set via the imgdir_sprite stylevar. You have one additional button in the ACP (CSS-Sprites -> Refresh) which automatically creates all sprites, the according css definitions and includes those css definitions in the vBulletin css rollup files.

Installation

First of all, if you didnt want to change the templates manually, install the Template Modification System (TMS). Now proceed with the installation:

• upload the contents of the upload folder into your forum home directory.
• import the add on in the ACP
• upon installation a new stylevar imgdir_sprite will be created. Update this stylevar based on your file structure - default value is the vbulletin sprite directory. Make sure the folder is writable, else the sprites can't be saved!
• create the sprites via the ACP at CSS-Sprite using the Refresh option.
• If you have installed TMS, you are done now. This was an easy gained speed up, not? If you didnt installed TMS and didnt want to do it, proceed with the next point:
• in order to use the sprites, you then will have to edit some templates. The diffs (xou will find it in the do_not_upload folder show which parts you have to delete '<' and which parts to add '>' In addition, on top find the lines in which you will find the respective code.[/b]

[addamroy]

Thanks Johan.

I'm not sure I understand the custom icon feature...

I don't really want this mod to 'change' any of my existing icons, do I have to do that with this?

I was under the impression that I install this thing, and it will take care of the rest, and my site will load faster... Is that correct or is there more to this than I realize?

[Johan Hiemstra]

It won't change anything you will tell it to change. The custom icon feature is optional, you can ignore it.

I was under the impression that I install this thing, and it will take care of the rest

That's correct. Just follow the installation instructions above. If you don't use the Template Modification System (TMS) you need to make quite a few template modifications manually.

Your site will load faster, and it can reduce server loads noticeably. The actually difference depends on how much visitors your site receives however. In particular the forum home and forum display pages will load faster and that's important for search engine rankings as well. Since vBulletin is pretty slow by default this is one of several things you can do to speed up the forums and I'll take anything that makes it a more smooth experience for my visitors.

[addamroy]

I absolutely agree on the load times.

You mentioned it depends on how many visitors I get, I'm getting around 1500 visitors a day.

[Johan Hiemstra]

You mentioned it depends on how many visitors I get

Yeah, but I only meant that in regards to reducing server loads. Whether you have 1500 per day like you, or 15,000 per day like me, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I truly believe sprites should be used by default in vBulletin. It's one of the great things about the new CKeditor, which also uses a spritesheet for it's buttons/controls.

[addamroy]

What's the 'do not upload' folder for??

There's a template_changes.diff file in there, am i not supposed to do anything with it?

Why is it even in there in the first place if I'm not supposed to upload it??

[Johan Hiemstra]

That's file contains the template changes you need to make manually IF you do NOT use TMS.

As mentioned in the installation instructions above:

in order to use the sprites, you then will have to edit some templates. The diffs (xou will find it in the do_not_upload folder show which parts you have to delete '<' and which parts to add '>' In addition, on top find the lines in which you will find the respective code.[/b]

[addamroy]

Will this still work if I install the template modification system addon, then install this one, then uninstall the template modification system addon when it's done?

The TMS addon puts a sitewide branding link back to their site in the footer of the forum, which is quite disappointing, and I want to avoid this but there's ALOT of template changes and I don't want to mess anything up.

So can i do that? Install TMS just to make this add-on install easier then uninstall TMS?

[mrbreeze]

i don't think this helped me.. i got a 59 for my site.. i must've installed something wrong.

[tme_power]

Pls make an update for vbb 4.1.8

[Johan Hiemstra]

Originally Posted by mrbreeze

i don't think this helped me.. i got a 59 for my site.. i must've installed something wrong.

Combining images into sprites is good for only a small portion of your total page speed score. With a 59 you should be looking at many other improvements. I added Xcache and mod_deflate (instead of vB gzip option) and I do have a score of 96 now.

Originally Posted by tme_power

Pls make an update for vbb 4.1.8

Yes pls do. :up:

I didn't run the Refresh option after upgrading to 4.1.8 and it still works fine. Just make sure the upgrade doesn't wipe your template modifications if you made them manually.

Originally Posted by addamroy

So can i do that? Install TMS just to make this add-on install easier then uninstall TMS?

Sounds like a bad idea. I'm not really familiar with TMS but I think if you remove TMS you remove the template modifications as well. It's not as hard as it seems to make those modifications manually, plus you can test them out every time you changed a template before moving on to the next.