Learn how to speed up your Apache web server and how to optimize your site for a better loading time.

1. Google Mobile First Index
Speed up your web / Apache / SEO
Emirodgar / https://emirodgar.com - @emirodgar

2. Optimize Apache http web server & web

3. Check Apache active modules
We need access through SSH in order to execute linux commands
Check Apache active modules with:
● apache2ctl -M
If not activated, we need to turn on expires and headers:
● a2enmod expires
● a2enmod headers
After that, we need to restart the server
● service apache2 restart

4. Apache .htaccess file
Now we need to edit .htaccess file which is located at the root of our site
(base www dir).
If it doesn’t exist, we can create it through FTP. After that we just need
to add some lines in order to speed up our site. We are going to active:
● Cache-control
● GZIP Compression
● Keep alive
● Etag

5. .htaccess set cache-control
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/js "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 day"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
</IfModule>

6. .htaccess set Etag
Etag helps to use cache memory in a more efficient way. It works like a digital print, it only changes when
a file has changed.
FileETag MTime Size

7. Check if it is working

8. .htaccess GZIP compression
<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>

9. Check if it is working

10. .htaccess set keep-alive
Allow to transfer multiple files between server and browser
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

11. Check if it is working

12. .htaccess redirect errors to homepage
This code will help us to redirect all errors to the homepage. Use it carefully. It doesn’t affect the speed
but can help us to handle multiple errors.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /? [L,R=301]

13. .htaccess prevent hotlinking
As the previous point, it doesn’t affect the load time, but can help us to control our resources preventing
others sites to consume them.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?emirodgar.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg)$ https://domain.com/image.jpg [NC,R,L]

14. Optimize resources
In order to speed up we need to work with
optimized files:
● Compress HTML
● Compress CSS
● Compress JS
● Compress images

15. Compress and optimize HTML

16. Compress CSS

17. Select CSS used
Make sure you only include in your page the CSS styles you are actually
using in the site.
CSS Used is a Chrome plugin that will select the CSS you need (export &
create a new final file). Firefox has similar plugins with the same
functionality.

18. Compress Javascript

19. Compress images
We can use one of the several tools we have online:
● https://kraken.io/web-interface
● http://optimizilla.com
● https://compressor.io
● https://tinypng.com

20. Use a cookieless subdomain as CDN
Let’s create our own CDN (Content Delivery Network). You can also use some service as Cloudflare (free
and paid plans available).
● Create a subdomain of your own domain or use another domain
● Load static files as CSS, JS and images from this new access
Learn more about cookie free domains.

21. Use a cookieless subdomain as CDN - Analytics
If your are using Google Analytics, make sure you are not generating cookies on the CDN subdomain. For
that, set cookie_domain to none.

22. Install modpagespeed
You can also install mod_pagespeed in your server. Once installed, learn how to configure it.
cd /tmp
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-stable_current_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-stable_current_amd64.deb

23. Check if it is working

26. Google Mobile First Index
Speed up your web / Apache / SEO
Emirodgar / https://emirodgar.com - @emirodgar