Speed up your website with caching and compression

Learn more about the Speed up your website with caching and compression Adobe Muse widget

Speeding up your website is surprisingly simple. In this post, you'll learn how you can instantly speed up any Adobe Muse website.

Table of contents

  1. The code
    1. Leverage browser caching
    2. Enable gzip/compression
  2. What is browser caching
    1. Verify that browser caching is enabled
  3. What is gzip/compression
    1. Verify that gzip/compression is enabled
  4. Discussion

The code

Add the following to the beginning of your .htaccess file. If you have any 301 redirects, place them after the following blocks of code. None of the text below is a placeholder — in other words, don't change anything about the text. Any text that follows after the number sign (#) is a comment, and can be removed.

Leverage browser caching

Click to read below about browser caching.

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 week"

Enable gzip/compression

Click to read below about gzip/compression.

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

What is browser caching

When a webpage is opened for the first time, a browser has to download all of the files on that page. Once the file is downloaded, the browser is able to reaccess the file much faster if caching is enabled. Once the file is cached, it will continue to use the cached for the amount of time specified.

Verify that browser caching is enabled

Once you've added the code above to your htaccess file, paste the URL of any page of your website in this tool and click 'Checkup!'.

Verify that caching is enabled


What is gzip/compression

Gzip/compression is pretty much what it sounds like. Your web server compresses the file making it much smaller in size and then serves the smaller file to the browser. Enabling this will, on average, reduce the file size anywhere from 70-90%.

Verify that gzip/compression is enabled

Once you've added the code above to your htaccess file, paste the URL of any page of your website in this tool and click 'Test'. You'll get a big green Yes if compression is enabled.

Verify that compression/gzip is enabled

Discussion