In a new tutorial posted to the PHPRiot.com site today Quentin Zervaas shows you some of the steps he's taken to improve the response time and overall speed of his site to help with the ever-increasing load.

Google have recently announced that the speed of a web site is now used as a factor in determining its search rank. This is great news for the skillful PHP developer, since it allows you to gain an advantage over those not as dedicated to their art.

He decided on the Google Page Speed an YSlow plugins for Firebug as a benchmarking platform to test the speed and response time of the different parts of his site. These plugins give your site rankings and overall recommendations on what you could be doing better to help its performance.

He talks about content delivery networks, minifying your CSS and Javascript, a method for caching generated pages for a certain length of time and gzipping your content to make it stream to the browser more effectively.