WEBO Software increases efficiency for the website of charity fund "Happy World"

WEBO Site SpeedUp increased efficiency of Russian charity fund - "Happy World".

WEBO Site SpeedUp is a wholesome product to speed up a website. There can be not enough time to tune hosting environment, sometimes you need any solution out of the box - that's about us. And it's much easier to have only one module to optimize website performance than apply handy changes to CMS or web server.

Children's charity fund "Happy World" (www.hworld.ru) was created in 2005. The foundation raises funds and provides assistance to children with serious illnesses. Only the last year 199 children received the necessary treatment at $2.6 million. Wards fund are children from poor families. They want to get well and together with their peers go to kindergarten, to school. Strong, reliable adult hand help to cope with the seemingly insurmountable problems, - says about fund activity Olga, its coordinator.

Geography of the project is quite broad - it covers the whole Russia territory. For this reason site of a charity fund for the last few years changed 6 hosting providers, which were periodically unable to bear the load. And now the website uses a distributed hosting from Media Temple (virtual hosting on the "clouds") with Joomla! + Apache + MySQL.

Average load on www.hworld.ru is about 20k unique visitors a month. But during the fund-raising campaigns it can increase several times. Once a campaign to raise funds for the treatment of one of our wards began, - says Michael, a fund technical specialist - and there were more than 8 000 unique visitors per day. It was necessary to accelerate the website load time for visitors and fit a dedicated hoster power. Due to the rapid increase in attendance it urgently needed to optimize Joomla! CMS. There was chosen the product for the universal website acceleration to achieve this goal - WEBO Site SpeedUp.

As Michael says, after the installation WEBO Site SpeedUp reduced consumption of GPU (unit of measurement of power consumption which is used in Media Temple). This allowed to fit the provided power and not to overpay for a non-optimized site. There have been indications that the site was being loaded faster. Both the first and returned visits were speeded up with competent caching. Latter is extremely important for the fund - there are a lot of regular visitors, and it is a huge benefit for them - fast website load speed and website stability.

What is the most important thing - in the most tense moments for the host when a child's life hangs in the balance, and is going active raising for medical treatment, we are confident that the site is working as quickly as possible, saving the lives of children - concludes Michael.

Website load speed is connected not only with the robust website performance, but also with the confidence of visitors to the website information. For charity fund the last fact leads the priorities list. And if there is any possibility to increase confidence of visitors to the charity - you need to do it now, do not fish or cut bait. Because the child's life depends on the decision about donation.

High Performance for Contra Costa County

WEBO Site SpeedUp was installed in Halfway to Concord website and significatnly increased its profitability.

"Traffic is seasonal based on local election cycles and holidays, but we can document a 20 per cent increase in visits since implementing WEBO Site SpeedUp."

Launched in early 2004, Halfway to Concord (www.halfwaytoconcord.com) is a blog covering news, politics, culture, business and various events for Contra Costa County. The site's hyper local focus has helped it become a leading independent online news source for East Bay of Northern California, USA.

Halfway to Concord has more than 12k unique visitors monthly, most of them return to the website at least once a week. The website core is a WordPress installation on a Bluehost dedicated server. But even this didn't provide sufficient page load time which was more than 5 seconds for every page. And Bill Gram-Reefer, Halfway to Concord founder and editor, decided to improve user experience with speedier loading site to increase readership.

Because of its hyper local focus and audience, Halfway to Concord cannot currently accelerate with CDN usage or any number of particular WordPress hacks. There must be a solution to provide maximum website performance. "We had slow loading pages", says Gram-Reefer. "Many visitors chose to move on before page load."

CDN or other network distribution solutions didn't fit because the website is located very closely to the vast majority of its visitors and server response time is not crucial. But a complete set of performance optimization practices - including file compression to multiple host usage and unobtrusive logic implementation - provided by WEBO Site SpeedUp resolved all issues.

"While experiencing some expected bumps in the road during implementation, WEBO Software tech support was helpful and gracious, eager to help customers instead of berate them for asking questions", Gram-Reefer adds. Through close collaboration, Halfway to Concord was accelerated approximately 2.8 times, especially for return visitors. And they were grateful!

Finally YSlow was improved from 56 to 90. This brought about 20 per cent increase in visits. With a few simple actions automatically handled with WEBO Site SpeedUp, the website became faster and could handle more advertisement and visitors.

Only a full range of website load speed optimization methods can help such local websites or small blogs to provide new levels of user experience for their readers. And this can be easily achieved with very little effort.

WEBO Site SpeedUp v0.9.7

We are moving to completely stable and featured v1.0 and here is one more update on this way. In the version 0.9.7:

• Improved UI. All icons were recreated and combined to a few of CSS Sprites (via Auto Sprites tool). Now the whole interface loads faster and there are less files in package (update is going also faster).
• Added option to exclude WEBO Site SpeedUp logic. You can define in System Status -> Settings a number of parts of URL to exclude from processing - and they won't be accelerated with WEBO Site SpeedUp. This field has the same syntax as for Server Side Cache exclude option.
• Improved smush.it callbacks. Reviwed some more issues with bunch image optimization of a huge amounts of data. Callbacks from smush.it tuned a bit.
• Improved static gzip tool. Now it can use gzip console tool if it's allowed to be executed from PHP.
• Improved CSS Sprites logic. Fixed a minor issue with ancesting seletroes lookup and improved CSS Tidy merging qualities.
• Improved gzip on CGI enviroments for CSS/JavaScript files.
• Fixed minor compatibility issues.

Download new version from here or just update it from your product interface.

WEBO Site SpeedUp v0.9.6

One more intermediate version before stable 1.0 release. We fixed a lor of UI bugs (makeup / client side logic) and improved general stability.

Changes log:

• Improved general UI stability / fixed minor issues.
• Improved Apache modules detection / .htaccess changes.
• Added rollback to stable feature.
• Fixed issue with rewriting current JavaScript / CSS files with wo.static.php equivalents.
• PHP Fusion (7.0.5) added to supported systems.

Now there is the complete set of native modules (WordPress / Joomla / Drupal / Bitrix).

Download the latest WEBO Site SpeedUp

WEBO Site SpeedUp v0.9.5

Today we have released the first (official) version of new WEBO Site SpeedUp. Its general state is beta (release candidate), but all unstable issues are related to UI only. Main core stability is improved (since version 0.6.7) and some new features were added.

Get the latest version.

Before public 1.0 release we are going to review and improve current user interface (in terms of usability and response times). Also it seems support for punypng optimization also will be added to 1.0 (since they have API get up).

Feel free to submit any bugs here, we appreciate your help in improving this awesome software package.

You can also check public demo of WEBO Site SpeedUp.

WEBO Site SpeedUp public beta

Here we are with the hottest performance optimization software. We are still working to pplish it but you can enjoy this stuff under you favorite CMS. Here are WEBO Site SpeedUp 0.9.5b download links:

• Standalone package
• Joomla! 1.5 installer
• WordPress installer
• Drupal installer

Installation is the same as usual - just copy plugin in WordPress or Drupal to general plugin directory and activate it via administrative interface. Then go to Settings page and play with WEBO Site SpeedUp interface.

For Joomla! 1.5 you just need to install appropriate package (via Extensions installer) and go to the component's page.

Upgrade procedure

If you are using old version and want to upgrade to the newest one -- please store file web-optimizer/config.webo.php somewhere (just as a backup), than upgrade your package to this beta version. Usually you need to update it once more - from WEBO Site SpeedUp interface (Update is located in System Status -> Updates -> Show me beta versions). Then configuration file will be altered to fit new structure. If you have any troubles with upgrading - please contact us. It seems you should have at least backed up configuration file to perform restoration.

Joomla! users please note that there is no standard way to upgrade current Web Optimizer plugin to WEBO Site SpeedUp component + plugin. So please somehow save settings from plugin interface / database. You will be able to set them back (WEBO Site SpeedUp by default is in a debug mode, website won't be hurted, cache files will be saved).

Known issues

There a few minor bugs we are still working on:

• Not all blocks are loaded at once on Control Panel (home) page in IE.
• Interface doesn't look perfect under IE6/7.
• Optimization results may be counted incorrectly sometimes (just not countered properly).
• Some pages / UI elements will be changed a bit to make overall design better.

Complete ist of WEBO Site SpeedUp / Web Optimizer packages also is located here: http://code.google.com/p/web-optimizator/downloads/list

WordPress Performance: Step-by-Step Every Day

We are going to completely review all sides of WordPress-based blog performance with a set of articles. For this purpose we created a simple blog on a shared hosting — www.speedingupwebsite.com — and every day there will be new articles about WordPress performance (both server and client sides).

We will review all possible plugins variations (on this website) and give you complete information how you can speed up your WordPress blog. No more '10/20/30/40+ tips about WordPress speeding up'. All information in one place. All failures and successes and all detailed manuals right here. And all of them will tested on a real website.

Keep tuned: www.speedingupwebsite.com or via RSS. If you have any ideas to cover in tests and comparisons - please share them in comments.