Tip: Speeding up iWeb

Question

Well, I've mostly switched to using Freeway Pro for web design, but I wanted to put this tip out in the iWeb community.
I've been playing with speeding up my websites per the suggestions from the Google Page Speed Test. What I found was that iWeb are slow! www.3michigan.org had scored 7/100 (really, really bad).
1. Optimize the images using ImageOptim (free!) before uploading them to your web space. This means that you first have to publish to a local folder first, optimize the images, and then upload to your server using an FTP app, like Cyberduck.
To find all the images in the local folder, navigate to it in finder, and type "blah" into the finder search. Then, press the + button and select "Kind is Image - All. Now, highlight the "blah" that you typed in prevously and hit the delete key. All the images in the local publish folder will now appear.
Type Command-A and drag them all to the ImageOptim window. Now, ImageOptim will optimize all the images and automatically save them back into the folder where they came from.
Now all you have to do is upload it to your webserver!
2. Leverage Browser Caching
Open your text editor and paste this bit of code into it:
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
Save this file as "htaccess" on your computer. Then upload it to the public_html or www folder on your server. Now, rename it to ".htaccess" (Without the quotation marks). If you server hides system files, then the file should dissapear from view.
Anyone else have any tips for speeding up an iWeb website?

Answer 1

I don't really pay attention to stats because they can be manipulated so many ways and there are so many variables. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
If a web page takes more than a few seconds to load you will lose cutomers. I had one person claim their site loaded in so many milliseconds! Of course, it didn't. There are so many variables beyond the actual size of the files -  such as the speed of the internet connection for a start.
So many people creating websites seem to blissfully unaware of the fact that a large and growing number of their potential customers are using wireless networks and are up against data limits. They need to learn to cut all the non essential crap no matter what way you create web pages.
Optimizers will obviously give the best improvements on badly coded sites.
Apps like iWeb have to have lots of divs with positioning info to allow the user to be able to drag stuff around and drop it anywhere they want. Using a little thought and minimal css you can produce an equivalent page with a fraction of the code by using the position of items in the HTML.
When coding a site I try to avoid any positioning info apart from some floats and media queries for responsive designs. iWeb has to add this info for every item. A lot of it is inline which is one cause of slow downloading sites. The browser has to load this info for every page instead of just reading a master stylesheet once.
Apps like Freeway and Flux do a little better but its down to the user. The more you depend on drag and drop rather than code, the more code the app has to write to make up for the users inadequacies.
I can code a website with Flux that is faster than most but, because I can, I don't need an app like Flux or Freeway anyway.
Its unfortunate that there's nothing much around that will help users who are unwilling to learn code to create faster loading sites since this is becoming more important due to the rapid increase of mobile devices and less people using computers to surf.
Unfortunately, you can't build a one size fits all website without getting your hands dirty with some code. You only have to look at the amount of code that the online mobile website builders produce to see that this is just a bad joke.
HTML5 allows us to use leaner, meaner code and the advances in CSS are helping to make up for the extinction of flash and to cut down on javascript. Browsers are begining to catch up - even Internet Explorer. Its just the people who are being left behind!
People expect movies and slideshows on websites nowadays because they don't like to read. Movies need to be loaded in different file sizes and formats for different devices with flash fallback for older browsers. I haven't seen any software that will do that without learning code.