I have hosted 2 websites; one is in Wordpress and another one is in phpBB. I got the following scores from gtmetrix.com for the sites respectively.




I have very basic plugins/mods installed in both the sites. No caching/ no SEO tools/ no SEO mods. Only .httaccess rules are applied as follows:

wordpress

RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([^/]+).html$ http://mywebsite.com/$3

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

<Files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

# directory browsing
Options All -Indexes

<Files ~ "^.*\.([Hh][Tt][Aa])">
order allow,deny
deny from all
satisfy all
</Files>

phpBB:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

# Enable expirations
ExpiresActive On 

# Default directive
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

</IfModule>

# directory browsing
Options All -Indexes

<Files ~ "^.*\.([Hh][Tt][Aa])">
order allow,deny
deny from all
satisfy all
</Files>

What may be the possible reason for such a low score in phpBB site? I have applied to "Leverage Browser Caching Rules", but it is not in effect actually.

Please help me to improve my score.

Sorry, if I am Off-topic.

Have you installed php apc? That will improve php's processing time quite a bit.

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GTmetrix grades your page based on the given list of recommendations. Which recommendations do you score poorly on?

You may also want to run your sites through http://www.webpagetest.org/ and view the "Performance Review" report.

I am getting excellent speed with wordpress (primary site) without using any cache plugin / php APC.

But score is poor with phpBB (secondary site) only. So, it may be a tuning issue with phpBB. I fear installing php APC may reduce the performance of my main site. I may be completely wrong with this view.

Here are the major recommendations to worth mention:-

Combine images using CSS sprites
Leverage browser caching
Add Expires headers
Use cookie-free domains
Configure entity tags (ETags)