Support Forum

 I was having a huge slow down on my forum's loading time and couldnt find much help in respect for speeding it up because of so many variations in hosting, servers etc etc. (this works great for a shared server environment)

 Special Note: This is only for forums utilizing a basic white background. Reason is, these images were minimized for white background. It can be done for other colors, but is extremely time consuming.

 Here is a helpfull tip that can significantly speed up your page load times.........

There are tons of icons that come with most of the themes for sp, by simply using photoshop or something similar you can increase icon and image load time by 50-85% alone, simply load the images in your photo editing software, then when saving since most are png format(which is huge by itself), choose to save as png-8 instead of standard png-24.

 This works great if your forum background is basic white. The reason is, by compressing to png-8 you create a white halo around the images, but with a white background you do not see it. Other color backgrounds and it looks like crap basically. So on that note, be sure you create a backup of your images before doing this)

Im going to attache a copy of the compressed images here if anyone wants them. Do a backup of your images then simply overwrite the images for your "stacked" theme in sp. (you can do the same for any theme, these are just the ones ive already done)

 Now if you really want to shave off some page load time, I increase mine from average 6-15secs, down to less than 2secs by adding in an image cache over ride into my htaccess file. Again if you choose to do this make a backup of your original and save it, just in case you do not like the desired outcome.

Simply place this at the bottom of your htaccess for your blog  ....

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType text/problem-with-post-edit-buttontml "access plus 3 days"

ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 7 days"

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 7 days"

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days"

ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 30 days"

ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days"

ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 30 days"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days"

ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 30 days"

</IfModule>

If you want to test these first before making changes, use google chrome browser, right click, then click on "Inspect Element" at the bottom of the list. Once that is open, look across the top and click on "Network", after you have the network subpage open, then use the refresh circle to refresh your page. You will be able to see every http process being called upon to make your forum open. Every image, js, page element and more. You can see how long it takes to load those dozens of png icons.

 Now make the changes and edits, then do the same test and notice the load speed improvements.

Now the ultimate solution, would be to make the icons .jpg images to match your theme.

Bill

http://www.podaid.com