Got 2 minutes for a faster website?
With Google’s confirmation that the time taken to load a web page is now a ranking factor web developers and designers have been prompted to sit up and pay renewed attention site performance. Here are just a handful of considerations that today’s responsible 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 simply a collection of servers setup to efficiently deliver content to end users.
As web designs become richer and more engaging to the end user they require an increasing number of components including javascript, images and maybe Flash. On a first visit a number of HTTP requests are made in order to download these elements. If these are cached then there is less to download on a subsequent visit 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, perhaps using GZIP, is another technique that should be in every web developers speed optimisation arsenal. GZIP is supported by around 90% of todays browsers and it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.
There are many additional techniques that can aid not only the search engine optimisation of web pages but will enhance the users experience. For example: stylesheets should be located at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; both javascript and CSS files should be minified; and javascript and CSS should be in external files; also, reducing the number of DNS lookups and redirects is always a good idea. Good luck.
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