Lots of Questions including db use to display content

[AnthonyArde]

Hi my name is Anthony. i have a website that i have developed.
it runs a phpbb forum and is pretty basic in its design - utilizing .htm files with links to other files and so forth.

i have a few questions for the guys on here who are able to assist me in serious optimisation of this site.
what am I able to do about the load speeds of the site, is there a better way to display information eg- via a database instead of htm files to reduce http requests?
is there a way to increase the speed of the phpbb forum?
will your website receive more hits with a .com domain?
is there a way i am able to change from html to php to increase speed or change to another language?
i pretty much would like to know anything that would improve the load time of each page on my site either drastically or the smallest change without paying a great deal on web hosting or hardware.

also i have set up a series of meta tags on my index page, do i require meta tags only on the index page or throughout the whole site? how does this work?

Is there software out there that is able to detect broken links for me. my site is getting huge and i`m the only one running it.

i have looked at joomla and the way they use a database to display information - this looks cool - is this only for convienience or for productive reasons?

Thanks

Anthony

[247SiteAlert]

>what am I able to do about the load speeds of the site, is there a better
>way to display information eg- via a database instead of htm files to
>reduce http requests?

First of all what kind of hosting do you have? Paid? Free?

Are you on a Linux server or Windows?

I don't think you would see an improvement in speed by switching over to a database vs .html files - so from a speed stand point I say no improvement there.


>will your website receive more hits with a .com domain?

No it doesn't matter - your website site will receive as many hits as your marketing efforts permit - it's all in marketing - the fact that it is a .com or not, does not matter.

BTW what is your domain type if it isn't .com?


>is there a way i am able to change from html to php to increase speed
>or change to another language?

You already asked this - my comment was no, I don't think this would make any difference.


>i pretty much would like to know anything that would improve the load
>time of each page on my site either drastically or the smallest change
>without paying a great deal on web hosting or hardware.

Since we don't know if you are using a free service or a paid service I will say this: to increase the speed of a page loading, it needs to be as small as possible. Mainly this means go easy on the graphics.

If you're using a free service you're most likely hosed. They have no incentive to help you speed up your site and being a free hosting service they have crammed as many websites onto one server as possible.

You can get a professional website for as little as 2.95/mo with the performance you are looking for and with people who care about the performance - you are obviously very unhappy with the performance of your current hosting service. I have a couple of sites with 1849webhosting.com and I'm very pleased with them - I have one shared and one VPS hosting plan with them.


>also i have set up a series of meta tags on my index page, do i require meta >tags only on the index page or throughout the whole site? how does this >work?

Meta tags should be on each web page - google around for tutorials on how to sue meta tags.


>Is there software out there that is able to detect broken links for me. my >site is getting huge and i`m the only one running it.

Getting huge in what sense? Number of users? Huge in disk space? bandwidth?

Yes, there is software to detect broken links - again, google around to see what is there.

You may also be interested in our free website monitoring service.


>i have looked at joomla and the way they use a database to display >information - this looks cool - is this only for convienience or for productive >reasons?

Productive reasons. They use a database so that they can, among other things, have different users login and update content on a website. Joomla is a very cool product and it's free.