If you are satisfied with your website, look again. Chances are there are several things that will help optimize your website while keeping the overall look and functionality the same. In particular, one of the biggest trends is a Content Management System which makes updating your site as easy as filling out a few form fields and typing some text into the form. Unfortunately, most tools that make it 'easier' lack when it comes to making it 'better'.

This is no big surprise as the same system that makes it easy to manage your site must fit all possible scenarios and may not be the best way to handle YOUR situation. This is where website optimization services like Comptrio.com come in to help improve your site according to your specific needs. A professional service will be able to assess your specific website and make optimization recommendations based on your usage and requirements.

One of the biggest downfalls of the 'owner friendly' CMS systems is a very 'server un-friendly' navigation system. What could be easier for the owner than to enter a new category name and have the database store the category name, link, and ID# and just call them on every page load? With one additional step while updating your categories, the same code that is called 10 times (assuming you have 10 categories) every time the page is loaded can be run once when you update the navigation and write a file with all of the navigation in a static or unchanging file.

This static navigation can be called every time a page on your site is requested and may cut down on the number of queries to the database by double digit numbers. I recently optimized a website and removed MORE THAN 95% of the database queries by using this method. The website went from nearly 1,000 database queries to only 20 each time the page is loaded into a users browser.

This required changing 2 sets of navigation with new code, but had an amazing effect on the server load during high-traffic and allowed an incredible amount of users to connect all at once that was not possible before.

Another change that can be made is to ensure that your server is 'properly' using Apache's built-in cache. While caches can also be setup within the HEAD section of your pages, using Apache itself to setup the 'rules' will cut down on the code used on your page. The trick to getting mod_expires setup correctly is trial and error. Eventually you will find settings that work best for your site.

Typically, images can be cached the longest as they don't change very often on most sites. HTML pages generally don't update change very often, but dynamic pages can be a little tougher to tune. I generally begin with 1 day from first access for php files and then adjust how long the cache lasts from there. The length of cache will depend on your actual needs on a 'per website' basis.

The beauty of using the cache is that common files (where all pages use the same header image) are stored in the users browser and not downloaded when they visit the next few pages of your site. For many websites, especially graphic-heavy sites, this can mean a serious reduction in the bandwidth and resources used in transferring the same layout images page after page after page.

In almost every case that I've seen, websites created by a wysiwyg editor (FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc.) can benefit from good, old handcoding. Many HTML tags are unnecessary or are used to help the wysiwyg editor to remember it's place on the page, but wysiwyg editors don't concern themselves with optimizing your code. Once again, this is a case of needing to work in every scenario, but not needing to work with the best optimization. Often times I will gain an 80% reduction in filesize by hand coding websites and removing extraneous 'fluff' from the code.

Reduction in image sizes (filesize, not space on a page) is perhaps one of the easiest optimization targets to pinpoint, but also one of the easiest ways to make your site look goofy. The best way to optimize images is to start with the original image files at full size with no compression. Fortunately, aside from a professional logo, this is usually what you are working with on your website already. With a 20% reduction in size (80% compression in the world of images), more size can be saved here than anywhere else. There are many tools to compress images and my personal favorites are the gifcruncher and jpeg wizard.

Making several passes over your website once it's completed should point to several areas where improvement is possible without changing the look, feel, and functionality of your website. As newer technologies are being adopted by a growing number of websites, optimization is more important than ever.