Increase Your Website Performance For Fun and Profit - Part 1
Website performance is a hot topic these days. Research has shown that by decreasing your page load time users will spend more time on your site.
Here’s some tips on speeding up your website:
Decrease the number of requests on a page
You can do this by using sprites which are basically large, well compressed images that contain lots of other images. You then use offsets in CSS to address the individual images.
Use a third party content delivery service
This one can be hard unless you’re a large corporation but it doesn’t need to be difficult. Try hosting your photos on flickr for example.
Set to the Expires header on static content
The Apache documentation for mod_expire and other resources on setting content expiry can be handy for this.
Gzip images, CSS, script
Once again you will need to look at which web server you are using to modify this. That being said on html, CSS and js it can dramatically decrease page load time.
Load unnecessary >Script> after page load
Examples are images that won’t be used until someone hovers their mouse over them or content that can be retrieved by AJAX.
Simplify your html
If you only need one div to display a piece of content then only use one. Brush up on your HTML skills in this area.
Don’t use iframes unless necessary
Iframes are like a whole new browser window. Imagine opening 10 or 20 of them on your web page. It really slows down the user’s experience.
Try to avoid cookies, or at least keep them to a minimum
Most sites won’t need to use cookies but if you do try to keep the number and size of the cookies at a minimum as each request back to the server involves sending the cookie as well.
Don’t use CSS filters
Don’t use work arounds for old browsers like IE6. Either let them suffer or give them a message asking to upgrade.
In the second part of this article we’ll cover some more ways to get a better result out of your website.
Webslug allows you to test your www.webslug.info/website performance. You can also compare it against your competitors.
Kimble Young.