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 stylesheet helps too.
CSS sprites is a way to lessen up image requests.
Image maps can combine multiple images in one.
Combining inline images into your (cached) stylesheets 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 help you achieve 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.
Gzip Components
Gzip is one of the most popular compression methods. Compression decreases response time by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Normally Gzipping reduces the response size by 70%
Put Stylesheets at the top
Research has shown that moving stylesheets 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 lookup the IP address for a given hostname. The browser can’t download anything from this hostname until the DNS lookup is completed. Reducing the number of unique hostnames has the potential to reduce the amount of parallel downloading that takes place in the page. Avoiding DNS lookups 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 this field.
Detailed Resources on how to make a website load faster:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.hostway.com/web-resources/search-engine-optimization/speed-search-engine-optimization/ten-ways-to-make-your-web-site-load-faster/
GeeksPerHour.com is a unique IT outsourcing platform designed for small businesses, web development companies looking for reliable freelancer to work on IT project. Over short period of 4 years, GeeksPerHour.com has now emerged as world renowned and most preferred global IT outsourcing platform.