Ever wondered why
people prefer a Ferrari over a normal car? Why everybody wants a fast processor
phone over a normal one? Answer is simple; Speed, it Saves time and avoids
frustration.
The same rule
applies to the websites. The faster your site is, the better it is for the
user.
Clearly, if your
site is slow, then it’s costing you your target traffic.
Following steps
ensure how you can make it blazing fast, thereby increasing its productivity:
Minimize HTTP requests:
Most of the time
spent by a user is on its frontend, downloading images, data, style sheets,
scripts etc.
Reducing the
number of components reduce the number of HTTP requests to render the page.
This is the key to speed up.
Combining all
scripts into a single script and combining all CSS
into a single style sheet helps too.
A CSS sprite is a way to lessen up image requests:
Image maps can
combine multiple images in one.
Combining inline
images into your (cached) style sheets is a way to reduce HTTP requests and
avoid increasing the size of your pages.
Hence reducing
HTTP requests is the first step to make your site faster.
Use a Content Delivery Network:
Geographically,
the content should be dispersed to multiple servers worldwide, as proximity of
the user to your web server does impact the speed of a site.
The key here is
not to redesign your app but to disperse your static content, which will
achieve you a much faster response.
Add an Expire or a Cache control Header:
This rule has 2 aspects:
By implementing
Never Expire Policy for static components we can make components cacheable.
An apt Cache
control header for dynamic components should be there to help browser with
conditional requests.
G-zip Components:
G-zip is one of
the most popular compression methods. Compression decreases response times by
reducing the size of the HTTP response. Normally G-zipping reduces the response
size by 70%
Put Style sheets at the top:
Research has
shown that moving style sheets to the document HEAD works effectively in
loading a page faster. To load a page progressively the browser should display
the content as soon as possible. This is more necessary in slow connections and
pages with heavy content.
Put scripts at the bottom:
Scripts can block
parallel downloads, hence creating a problem. But if images are served from
multiple hostnames, one can get more than two downloads in parallel.
Make JavaScript and CSS External:
Using external
files also normally produces faster pages because the JavaScript
and css files are cached by the browser.
Reduce DNS Look ups:
It generally
takes 20-120 milliseconds for DNS to look-up the IP address for a given
host-name. The browser can’t download anything from this host-name until the
DNS look-up is completed. Reducing the number of unique host-names has the
potential to reduce the amount of parallel downloading that takes place in the
page. Avoiding DNS look-ups cuts response times, but reducing parallel
downloads may increase response times.
Minify JavaScript and CSS:
Minification is
the removing of unnecessary characters from the code to reduce its size, hence
improving the load time. This include comments, unnecessary white space etc.
In JavaScript’s
case, it improves response time as the size of the downloadable file is
reduced.
Remove duplicate scripts:
Duplicate scripts
tend to give bad performance as it creates unnecessary HTTP requests. Hence
same JavaScript file shouldn’t be used twice.
For fulfilling
these needs, it is important that you hire a knowledgeable developer who
has extensive experience in his field.
At
GeeksPerHour.com we provide you the comfort of hiring world class developers at
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our email sudesh@geeksperhr.com
