I have spoken very recently about speeding up web site performance, and I thought would throw some more thoughts into the mix. The first is an EXCELLENT post from Yahoo on Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website, and it goes massively in depth, touching on all the points I made previously, plus a whole load more. It’s a LONG post, so prepare yourself a cup of tea, or cup o’ joe and get ready for the long haul.
Above and beyond Yahoo’s offering, I wanted to run over a cool feature of the Labs section in Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a Website Speed analysis suite and helps guide you through the process of helping to speed up the load times of your pages to ensure that they are sub 1 second. Anything above 1 second is considered slow!
Here’s a visual of the page for one of my sites:
As you can see tab pretty much includes a performance overview, a mandatory graph, a list of example pages from the site in question + their average speed over time, and then some all important suggestions on how to improve the performance of your website. In this case, 2 possibilities:
- Enable GZip compression – Minimize data transfer and save upto 33.2KB
- Minimize DNS Lookups – 2 singular files coming from 2 different hosts, unnecessary lookups
We all benefit from a faster web, from webmasters, to web site visitors and onto search engines. To this end they recommend installing a FireFox Add-on, the Page Speed plug-in. How this works or doesn’t work with Y-Slow, Yahoo’s equivalent web site speed plug-in, I doubt it will as they both tap into the Firebug architecture.
Anyhow, the Page Speed plug-in comes up with a variety of tips for your page optimisation delight including, but not limited to:
- Overall Page Speed Score
- Leverage browser caching
- Avoid bad requests
- Parallelize downloads across hostnames
- Combine external CSS
- Minify JavaScript
- Serve static content from a cookieless domain
- Minify CSS
- Minify HTML
- Optimize images
- Remove unused CSS
- Use efficient CSS selectors
- Combine external JavaScript
- Minimize DNS lookups
- Minimize request size
- Optimize the order of styles and scripts
- Specify a character set early
- Defer loading of JavaScript
So there you have it. Go forth and conquer, and really, you no longer have an excuse for a slow website. So get optimising!
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Mar 19, 2010 | Sazbean Mar 19, 2010
[...] your pages to ensure that they are sub 1 second. Anything above 1 second is considered slow! - Testing Website Slow Performance (Permanently Uncached) Website speed is going to be a metric that Google uses in the near future to [...]