is HTML the end all be all when it comes to load speed?
 

Option 1
An OPTIMIZED php about cats page that uses CDN, Minified JS/CSS that pulls data from database

VS

Option 2
An OPTIMIZED HTML down to the very atom; about cats page that uses CDN, simpified CSS that doesn't pull data from database



So the question is, IS THERE ANYTHING OPTION 1 can do to outperorm OPTION 2?

blackmonsters has helped me with advanced html5/php before. bump for him ^^^

cache your pages. its unlikely they need live data.

#porncms

Well, plain HTML is hard to beat in terms of the speed because it's served just like any static file and in combination with nginx and CDN it can be really fast.

BUT it lacks flexibility, so there must be some kind of trade-off. Everything that is powered with PHP will have some kind of processing and it will be slower than the plain HTML for sure but the key here is to optimize the PHP using various caching methods to speed the things up. It won't be faster than plain HTML but the key here is to have a relatively fast loading page (that loads if possible less than 250ms).

The amount of available tools to cache things today is big: from built-in php opcache, to varios CMS based file caching, redis, memcached to varnish. What you will use depends on what's the bottle neck of the application.

A dynamic page will never out perform a static page. Static pages can just be cached at the edge.

The fastest PHP project in the world is HHVM which takes the PHP and compiles to machine code.

AND, all that being said, it's the programmer who is most important in speeding up PHP. Shitty code = slow code.