Since Google’s first announcement in 2010 (!) that web page load times are now a ranking factor web designers and developers to pay additional attention to site performance considerations. Here are just a handful of speed tips about using factors that today’s web developers need to keep in mind.
Watch The Essential Elements: CSS, Javascript, Images, Movies, Cache
Most of today’s web pages are made up of a collection of components. These are including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. So go and minimize the number of elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests. This is necessary to render a page is crucial for fast page load times.
Around 80% of their response time end-user need to wait for all of the page elements to download. We all know that this waiting time can prompt visitors to leave an eCommerce site. Instead, they will visit a faster loading competitor. One can reduce this time by using a content delivery network to serve up static content such as javascript and CSS files.
A content delivery network is basically a collection of servers. These are set up in various geographic locations to efficiently deliver content to users.
Web designs become increasingly complex, richer and more engaging to the end-user. They, therefore, need an ever-increasing number of components to render, such as Flash and javascript.
More Speed Tips
When a visitor visits a site for the first time many HTTP requests will be made to download all of these elements. We can minimize this on subsequent visits by caching. More precisely we can control this 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 good for search engine optimization of web pages. They will also enhance the users’ experience. These include putting stylesheets at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom. Another technique is minifying both javascript and CSS files. A third way is putting javascript and CSS into external files. Finally, it makes sense to reduce the number of DNS lookups and avoiding redirects. Good luck.
