Quick tip to improve speed on ACT! Premium for Web

A user recently pointed out to me that the favicon.ico file used by ACT! Premium for Web is about 300KB.

For those who don’t know, the favicon.ico is an optional file that can be included on a web site and shows as a logo in web browsers next to the URL, the Browser tab and in bookmarks.

For more information, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

This file loads with every page, increasing the bandwidth. Consequently, these should be kept as small as possible.

The file on an APFW server is /APFW/images/favicon.ico

If you are using ACT! Premium for Web, you might find an improvement by using an ICO editor to reduce the file size… this is especially important if supporting clients on slower connections or if you have a lot of users.

If you don’t have an ICO editor, feel free to download a small ACT! favicon I created:

www.glcomputing.com.au/ACT-favicon.zip

Extract the favicon.ico to the folder I mentioned above on your server. It’s not too pretty, but as it’s under 4KB will save nearly 300KB per page

It’s not a huge improvement, but every bit helps, right?

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3 comments:

James Hale said...

I'm pretty sure it only loads once per session, not per page load. In fact, I just changed it to your icon, closed my browser (IE) then opened IE again and it still didn't download the icon again.

So I would think it's probably not really much of an issue.

GLComputing said...

Yes, depending on the cache setting it may load once per session or per page.

James Hale said...

I'm pretty sure it only loads once per session, not per page load. In fact, I just changed it to your icon, closed my browser (IE) then opened IE again and it still didn't download the icon again.

So I would think it's probably not really much of an issue.