How to increase speed of your Dotnetnuke website

In the past Dotnetnuke sites were know to be slow loading. Since version 4 a lot has been done to greatly improve speed and new and improved caching capabilities have been introduced. But how can you make use of Dotnetnuke's speed tweaks?

Heavy Caching

In Dotnetnuke's site administration under "Host - Host settings" under advanced settings you will find the performance settings. Here you can define how you would like Dotnetnuke to handle caching. Setting the caching options to Heavy caching will have Dotnetnuke maintain cached items in memory for the longest time and will greatly improve performance. If you do not suffer any undersired effects when heavy caching is engaged this is the recommended setting.

Public or Private cacheability

Set this option to public in case caching may be done by proxy servers and to private if caching may only be done by the browser. Reccomended settings is public.

Compression

Compression can greately decrease loading times by compressing the data before sending it to the user. Turning this option on is recommended but you will have to check if no undesired effects occur.

Extra caching options (Not in the menu)

although the above caching options let you decide if you want Dotnetnuke to offer caching there is something extra you can do. This will require you to edit your ascx skin files. Open your skinfile and add the following script:

<script runat="server">

Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

Page.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public)

End Sub

</script>

Final thought

Above tips will help you to optimize your Dotnetnuke website's speed. Implement them and test which are the best settings for your website.