Question

I have an django 1.1.1 app, actually in developement, thinking in best practices I ran the YSlow test (Grade E Ruleset applied: YSlow V2 ) it recomends:

Grade F on Add Expires headers

-There are 37 static components without a far-future expiration date.

Grade F on Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

-There are 37 static components that are not on CDN.

Grade F on Compress components with gzip

-There are 17 plain text components that should be sent compressed

How can I implement it with Django?

More context: Python 2.5, deployment at webfaction

Example:

Grade F on Make fewer HTTP requests

This page has 14 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 4 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.

Can be solved with Django-Compress

Answer 1

Of the three you listed, two are addressable at the web-server level. For example, in Linux/Apache:

For gzip, edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.conf

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>  
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript text/css application/javascript  
</IfModule>  

For Expires headers, first you need to enable mod_expires:

>cd /etc/apache2
>sudo ln -s ../mods-available/expires.load mods-enabled/expires.load

Then you need to configure it for the MIME types you want:

# edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default  
ExpiresActive On  
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 12 hours"  
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 12 hours"  
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 12 hours"  
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 12 hours"  

Writeup on why I recommend 12 hours here.

The last item (CDN) is typically something you outsource to someone like Akamai. It’s also quite expensive.