Kick PageSpeed Up A Notch

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If you’re using Apache and PHP 5.3 on your DreamHost domain, you have the magical power to enable Google PageSpeed. Just go and edit your domain and make sure you check the box for “Page Speed Optimization”:

PageSpeed Option

But what does that even mean, I hear you ask?

partnersPageSpeed is Google’s way to speed up the web (yeah, that was redundant), and it serves as a way for your server to do the work of caching and compressing, taking the load off your webapps. Like WordPress. Anyone can install this on their apache server, and it’s free from Google Developers: PageSpeed Mod. Since you’re on DreamHost, you lucky ducky you, we did it for you. Now you can sit back and relax.

The first thing to notice when you turn on PageSpeed is that it minifies your webpage. That means it takes your pretty formatted source code and gets rid of the extra spaces you don’t use. This is called by using the PageSpeed filter “collapse_whitespace.” Another filter we use is “insert_ga” which is how we’re magically able to insert your Google Analytics for you from your panel. That filter automatically inserts your GA code on every page on your domain. That’s right! No more plugins!

If you’re like me, you may start to wonder what other filters you should use, and that entirely depend on what you want to remove. I knew I wanted to remove code comments like the following:

<!-- #site-navigation -->

That’s easy! There’s a filter for “remove_comments” so I can just use that. They have a whole mess of filters listed in the Filter Documentation and reading through it took a while. If you read each one, at the bottom they talk about how risky a certain filter is. Taking that into account, I went ahead and added some low and some high risk filters, since I know what I’m using.

The magic sauce to add all this is just to edit your .htaccess and put in the following near the top:

<IfModule pagespeed_module>
    ModPagespeed on
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_comments,rewrite_javascript,rewrite_css,rewrite_images
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters elide_attributes,defer_javascript,move_css_to_head
    ModPagespeedJpegRecompressionQuality -1
</IfModule>

Really, that’s it.

The ones I picked are:

  • remove_comments – Remove HTML comments (low risk)
  • rewrite_javascript – minifies JS (med. to high risk, depending on your site)
  • rewrite_css – parses linked and inline CSS, rewrites the images found and minifies the CSS (med. risk)
  • rewrite_images – compresses and optomizes images (med. risk)
  • elide_attributes – removing attributes from tags (med. risk)
  • defer_javascript – combines JS and puts it at the end of your file (high risk AND experimental!)
  • move_css_to_head – combines CSS and moves it to the head of your file (low risk)

Now keep in mind, not all of the features will work. While DreamHost is on a pretty cutting edge version of PageSpeed, they’re constantly innovating over there and improving. The best thing about these changes is, if you do it right, you can speed your site up faster than any plugin could do for you. And that? Is pretty cool right there.

Subdomain vs Domain

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When two words are very similar, it’s easy to get confused. Which witch is which? Whether, weather, and wether. Affect vs effect… Okay, you know, English sucks. We have way too many words that will drive you to drink, and if you know anyone who’s learned English as a second language, please take time to tell them how amazing they are. My father’s wife is Japanese, bilingual in French, and is learning English. I know a smattering of French. Our conversations are fantastically amusing and thankfully we have great senses of humor.

Because I’m that familiar with the crazy of my native language, I have no surprise that people get subdomains and domains confused. Here’s the basic statement:

A subdomain is not the same as a domain.

That’s it. But since I don’t expect everyone to know what the heck I just said, I’m going to explain. Remember, don’t think you’re stupid for not knowing this! You can’t magically know everything, you have to learn it, and there are people like me who want to help you. Where the confusion kicks in isn’t that we call it a ‘subdomain’ but that the official definition is “a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain.” So we’ve just said a domain of a domain, and yet here I am pushing you and saying that a subdomain isn’t a domain when it clearly is.

It is and it isn’t.

  • A domain is pretty simple: elftest.net is a domain. It’s the solid basis that all websites are built on.
  • A subdomain is a subset of the domain: tools.elftest.net is a subdomain on elftest.net.

Notice how ‘tools.’ is in front of elftest.net? That extra period between tools and elftest is how we know this is a sub domain. The .net part is called the ‘Top Level Domain’ and any time you see www, that actually isn’t a subdomain, but a special term… You know what, let’s break this down with a picture.

Domain Example

You can ignore protocol for now (we can get into that another time). What we’re looking at is this:

URL: http://www.example.com/index.html
Top-level domain name: com
Second-level domain name: example.com
Host name: www.example.com OR example.com

Why is www special? It has to do with a lot of boring history, but suffice to say that used to be how we knew it was a webpage! Now we use http:// to say ‘This will be a webpage’ so many of us (myself included) feel that www is unnecessary and just makes URLs longer. However because of history, http://www.elftest.net and http://elftest.net will forever point you to the same place. This actually means that www is a subdomain, but it’s a very special one that points to the same place as no www at all. In very rare cases, a fancy website will redirect www and non-www to different places, but this is the exception, not the rule. Good SEO practices are to have the www and non-www point to the exact same place.

The meat of the matter is that most of the time, when someone asks ‘What’s your domain?’ they really mean ‘What’s your host name?’ My host name is elftest.net (or ipstenu.org or halfelf.org…. I have a lot of domains

Now let’s look at a subdomain.

Subdomain Example

They look shockingly similar, except that instead of www in front, I have sub. So what’s the deal here? Well because I’m using something other than www, I’ve designated sub.example.com as a subset of example.com, and thus a subdomain. Yes, it’s backwards. Sub should be below or behind, but remember, we’re calling .com the top level domain, so right-to-left this makes more sense.

I know. It’s all clear as mud. Even writing this I sat there and muttered “This stuff is nuts.” I know all this didn’t explain everything as clearly as I could wish, but I’ll break it down into the simplest terms that, while not 100% technically accurate, will tell every decent web tech what you mean:

When someone asks “What’s the subdomain?” you answer ‘sub.example.com’

If someone asks “What’s the domain?’ you say ‘example.com’ (sometimes they’ll ask “What’s the main domain?”)

If you’re on Multisite and someone asks “What’s the mapped domain, and what subdomain does it point to?” you say ‘mappeddomain.com and it points to mapped.example.com’

And never ever use domain mapping plugins for your subdomains. Those are for grownup domains only, not your subdomains.

For extra credit: Third level domains are what you get when you see things like example.co.uk – example isn’t a subdomain here, it’s the main domain. co.uk is the TLD. Why third? Well, we’d already used sub and second, and we needed some way to say that this is part of the primary URL, and not a subset. Also geeks love to confuse people.

Domain Registration, No Hosting

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Just want to use DreamHost for DNS? You can do that!

Login into your Panel and go into Domain > Registrations.

Click the “Add Hosting” button on the far right.

It will redirect you to a new page and from that page you can select from “Fully Hosted, Redirect, etc”. The very last one is “DNS Only”.

Go ahead and select that and there you go!

You can also go to the Manage Domains page and click on (Add New Domain / Sub-Domain button), and scroll to the bottom of the next page to set it up for DNS Only.

I’ll be in Tybee!

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There’s an upcoming WordPress Community Summit, and I’ll be attending! I was invited before I was employed here at DreamHost (who is providing lunch, yay!), so now I’m serving two purposes! The first is as a community support leader, and in that auspice, I plan to represent the common user. The second is as DreamHosts’s WordPress Support Manager, and there I will represent the support my company provides you DH users.

Do you have any topics you’d like to see me address at the meetup? Any annoying WordPress/DreamHost issues taht you’re not sure is WP or DH? Leave a comment and I’ll do my best!

Subdomains Back Where They Belong

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In my last post, I talked about how I did something dumb with my subdomains.

How did I install subdomains?

Stupidly. Or rather, stupid for DreamHost. See, many other hosts, when you make a subdomain, come up with this structure for your files:

/home/ipstenu/public_html/
                         /subdomain1
                         /subdomain2
                         /addon.com

So when I made my subs, I made them similar to that. What DreamHost does is this:

/home/elftest/elftest.net/
             /db.elftest.net/
             /addon.com

I suggest you do the default! If you didn’t, however, there is a way to fix it. It’s a two step process.

1) Move the files.

I found it easier to do this in Unix $ mv elftest.net/trunk trunk.elftest.net (this moves and renames all in one). If you wanted to do it via FTP, just drag and drop, then rename.

2) Change the location in Panel.

Go into your panel, edit the domain, and change elftest.net/trunk:
before: elftest.net/trunk

To trunk.elftest.net:
after: trunk.elftest.net

Give it 5 to 10 minutes, and you’re done!

tl;dr to the whole thing is this: Trust the tool! (Sharon, that was for you!)

Is It My Server or My Theme?

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This could go on any of my sites, but since the conversation started on the DreamHost forums, I thought I’d tackle it here.

When your site is running slow, it’s easy to pick on the webhost or the server you’re on, saying that’s the problem, and demanding someone else fix it. The truth is that speed involves a lot more variables than just the webhost. Sure, if your host is slow (or down), you’re stuck waiting on us, but there are a couple really easy ways to determine where the slowness is, and you might be surprised.

If you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, take a look at how long a page takes to load the first time, and then again on a refresh. When you look at these pages, they’re in PHP and take a little time to process. The more complex your code, the longer it can take to display. This won’t really impact a refresh, but it’s a good idea to see if your browser is caching anything. If the site is really slow, go look at a static HTML or TXT page. On WordPress, look at http://yourdomain.com/readme.html and see how fast that loads. If that’s slow, hey! It is your server! Open up a ticket with us and tell us that the site is slow to load static pages. It’s really important that you tell us what you’ve done, so we don’t have to waste time re-doing it all for you.

But most of the time you’ll see the html loads really fast. Why is that? It’s that pesky PHP taking a while to render. Now I know this brings up the obvious question of why would we use PHP if it takes longer to load, and the answer is complicated. There are a lot of benefits to using PHP (like being able to use those cool CMS’s to make publishing your site easier), and I’m not going to go into them. Just know that if you choose to use a modern CMS, then you’re likely going to be using PHP to render your site.

That means we have to consider how to make our PHP run faster. If you’re on shared hosting, the server side work should have been done for you, and if things are still slow then you have to consider the painful option that you did this to yourself. Don’t worry! That’s not a terrible thing, you probably just picked a theme, or a plugin, that is totally perfect for you, but a little slow. This is why people say ‘too many plugins/extensions slow your site.’ It’s not true, but the idea is that the wrong one will slow you down. And that is certainly true.

Go to Google PageSpeed Insights and check your site out. It should give you a hint as to what’s lacking. Don’t take this as the holy grail, though. Sometimes Google has really dumb advice, like ‘You should compress the code you’re using from google.com!’ Really? So why don’t you compress it, or tell me ‘Use this code instead from us! It’s already compressed!’ In theory, all of Google’s jquery code has a compressed version, but that’s not what most people see, so telling us to use it but not how is pretty idiotic, in my opinion.

I always tell people to look into minifying their output. That means you use a tool to make your HTML all mashed up together when someone looks at your source code. This simple step has amazing results for most sites. It took my Google Speed score from 71 to 81. Any score above 75 is a ‘good’ score from my experience (Microsoft gets a 77, after all, and while Google gets a 99, their main page is pretty minimalistic).

The point to all this is that your pagespeed is dependent on more than just how fast DreamHost is running. If you tell me that your site is slow, the first thing I do is look at a static page (I may even make one for you if I can’t find one). From there, maybe I’ll poke at the server, but most of the time it’s been your site’s configuration. I say this from a place of over 15 years of self-hosting: I’m nearly always the cause of my own problems.

Of course, if it’s your WordPress site being a slug, start with caching plugins and feel free to ask us for advice. If you have a wild and wooly, never been seen before, WP problem, don’t be surprised to see me showing up in your ticket.

phpMyAdmin vs CMS

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By ‘CMS’ I mean WordPress, Drupal, whatever.

So here’s a funny. I moved my DreamHost site to a VPS, so I could learn nginx (I’m still a newb) and suddenly I couldn’t get to my phpMyAdmin anymore! Before someone says it’s DreamHost’s fault, this is actually due to how I installed subdomains (which I don’t recommend) and configured nginx (still optomizing). That said, not every CMS is flexible enough for this, so if you have this problem too, here’s a work-around.

As you know, you’re supposed to go to http://mysql.elftest.net which then sends you to http://elftest.net/dh_phpmyadmin/mysql.elftest.net/ to get to your phpMyAdmin page. Except it gives you a 404 styled like your site instead.

Solution? Make a fake subdomain.

I made db.elftest.net (which has nothing), but now I can go to http://db.elftest.net/dh_phpmyadmin/mysql.elftest.net/ and log in!

How I buggered my subdomains, and how I fixed it, is another post.

WordPress Multisite Subdomains Without Wildcards

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The easiest way to run a Multisite network with subdomains is to use wildcard subdomains, because they’ll automagically map anything.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com and WordPress will in turn translate that for you.

When you’re on shared hosting, you can’t do that. But don’t worry! If you’re willing to do it manually, every time you have a new subdomain, you can still have subdomains! This is really easy, if weird.

Go to manage domains on your Panel and click on ‘Add New Domain / Sub-Domain’

Add your subdomain as ‘mysub.yourdomain.com’ and check the box to remove www (it’s a subdomain, you don’t need it, and it causes weird issues with some plugins).

Set the Web Directory to where you have your main domain installed (normally this will be /home/username/yourdomain.com ) – yes, I really mean exactly the same. This is what wildcards do for you, but since you don’t have it, you need to do this. It should look like this:

That’s it! Now you just scroll down and press Fully Host This Domain and wait till it’s provisioned. Once that’s done, you can go to mysub.yourdomain.com and it will take you to yourdomain.com! Add in a subdomain within WordPress called ‘mysub’ and everything will work exactly like it should.

Subdomains, WordPress and nginx

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This should be obvious, but I’m not familiar with nginx, so it wasn’t.

I added trunk.elftest.net as a separate subdomain (rather than Multisite) because I wanted it to run trunk and not impact anyone else.

The way that DreamHost works, is you have a separate folder for your nginx configurations, called nginx, and it lives off your home directory. This is commonly referenced as ~/nginx/ and yes, if you type in cd ~/nginx/ you’ll jump right there.

To make WordPress work, I had to create ~/nginx/trunk.elftest.net and add a wordpress.conf file there, with the standard DreamHost nginx config for WP.

######################
 # Permalinks
if (!-e $request_filename) {
 rewrite ^.*$ /index.php last;
 }

Magic.

Contact Form 7 and Anti-Spam

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DreamHost has a fairly simple anti-spam policy, which can be summed up as this: You cannot send email from an address that isn’t your domain.

If that was greek to you, don’t worry. What that means is that my WordPress blog here can only send emails as elftest.net. That poses a small problem if you’re not using your domain-name to send email (a rare occurrence in WordPress), and a large one if you happen to be using the popular Contact Form 7 plugin.

Contact Form 7 lets you create robust contact forms for your site, however it has one minor ‘flaw’ (and I hesitate to use that word). When it sends email, it sends it from the user who submits the form. DreamHost, naturally, doesn’t like this. joe@gmail.com isn’t an elftest user!

Thankfully there’s a work-around for you, and it’s really easy. For most people, the plugin SMTP Configure, once installed and activated, will automatically fix this for you! It’s written by a reliable and trusted programmer, and I highly recommend it. Remember! Once you install the plugin, just activate it. For the vast majority of people, this was it. Everything magically worked.

Then there were some people who came and said “No, this does not work.” I’ve yet to reproduce it, but one person told me that after putting in his SMTP credentials, just like you would setting up email clients, it worked perfectly.

Additional: If you’re using Jetpack’s contact form, and you’ve changed the ‘to’ email address, you will also need this plugin. You’ll know you’re using that option because you’ll see this in your contact form shortcode:

to="me@myotherdomain.com"