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Improving website performance with Page Speed

Since Google’s recent announcement that web page load times are now a ranking factor web designers and developers have been required to pay additional attention to site performance considerations. Here are just a handful of factors that todays web developers need to keep in mind.

Most of todays web pages are made up of a collection of components including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. Minimising the number of elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests necessary to render a page is crucial for fast page load times.

Around 80% of the end user’s response time is consumed in waiting for all of the page elements to download. It is well known that this waiting time can prompt visitors to leave an ecommerce site and visit a faster loading competitor. This time can be reduced by using a content delivery network to serve up the static content, such as javascript and css files. A content delivery network is basically a collection of servers setup in various geographic locations to efficiently deliver content to users.

As web designs become increasing complex, richer and more engaging to the end user they need an ever increasing number of components in order to render, such as Flash and javascript. When a site is first visited a number of HTTP requests will be made to download all of these elements. These can be minimised on subsequent visits by caching and this can be controlled using the Expires header. This header is commonly used for images but it should be routinely employed for all elements including Flash and javascript files.

Compression is another technique that every web developer should be using. GZIP is one of the most popular compression tools, supported by most browsers, it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.

There are lots of additional techniques that are both good for search engine optimisation of web pages but will enhance the users experience. These include putting stylesheets at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; minifying both javascript and CSS files; putting javascript and CSS into external files; reducing the number of DNS lookups and avoiding redirects. Good luck.

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