HTTrack is powerful and flexible, bristling with options. It runs under Windows, Linux, and Unix, is open source, and free. Highly recommended.

Of course, Web site mirroring isn't much use on sites that are highly dynamic, such as an e-commerce storefront. The underlying content may change too often or the page results may be too variable. Even so, it's often the case that you can improve the performance of such a site by mirroring selected pages within the site--pages that do not change often.

For example, many e-commerce sites have a front page that's effectively static for the current day. Despite the fact that the page doesn't change, the Web server probably still generates it dynamically. Since the home page is probably one of the most accessed pages, dynamically generating it over and over could be placing a significant load on the Web server's resources. In this situation you may want to consider mirroring the home page only and leave the rest of the site as fully dynamic. There may be other pages within such an e-commerce site that are also candidates for being converted to static HTML--perhaps the home page for each category of product being sold.

So if you want to speed up your Web site without upgrading your server hardware, think about getting hold of HTTrack and amaze your friends and co-workers.

Colin Neale is a Domino consultant specializing in document management and search solutions and is also an IBM Certified Instructor for Lotus Domino. Colin has also developed the C-Search range of products and can be contacted at cneale@c-search-solutions.com.