If you would like to make your net site display more quickly you have come to the right place. This editorial will describe and guide you through most of techniques necessary to reduce loading times of your net site.
The fact is that an average of 10-20% of the finish user response time involves retrieving website's HTML page where the other 80-90% involves downloading of stylesheets, scripts, images, flash files and other types of net site parts. So what can they do to reduce that time to a maximum? of the first steps is to make fewer HTTP requests.
way to accomplish fewer HTTP requests is to make use of CSS Sprites. CSS sprites let you combine images in to picture and using stylesheets offset that main picture to show different parts of that main picture. Imagine a scenario where you have a web-site with hundreds of small icons representing all kinds of things. For different pages containing a number of those icons your browser would make additional requests to download them unless those icons are already in browser's cache. Having the picture preloaded at the preliminary page would eliminate all those unnecessary requests later on.
The other way would be to combine your scripts and stylesheets. In lieu of loading ten different stylesheets or scripts you could load of each. You could accomplish that in variety different ways where a number of them would be using htaccess file and other ones using dynamic stylesheets.
In the event you own or manage an very large portal and have some funds to spend, the second step to reduce the loading times of your net site would be to make use of content delivery network (CDN). The basic idea of CDN is that it hosts all of your website's parts on a different servers in multiple locations based on propinquity to the user, to deliver your content more effectively. That way your web server only serves the actual HTML page and all other assets such as images, scripts and stylesheets are delivered from close CDN servers.
Third step would be to add an expires header for your stylesheets, scripts, images and static pages. That will make user browser cache those parts meaning the next time the same page or asset gets requested, they are used straight from the browsers cache eliminating unnecessary requests. In the event you are in a situation where you constantly update your scripts or stylesheets you could always implement a dynamic way of updating their filename. eg. (/css/v1/main.css, /css/v2/main.css). That would make sure user's browser would re-download the updated asset on change and use cached version otherwise.
Fourth step to lightning fast sites would be to make use of gzip parts. Currently the most popular & free compression system is Gzip. The only parts you ought to be concerned with are stylesheets & scripts. You ought to not gzip your sites images because they are already compressed. Gzipping your sites parts will reduce their download times up to 50%.
Fifth step would be to place your stylesheets at the top. That would enable what its called progressive rendering. On a slower connections the things such as header, navigation page contents & then the footer will appear in sequence after the other until the whole page is loaded. Having a stylesheet placed at the bottom will prevent displaying of those elements until the whole stylesheet is loaded.
Seventh important step would be to minify your javascript files. The system strictly consists of removing white spaces & comments resulting is smaller file sizes. are number of scripts online that could do that job for you.
Sixth step to net site optimization would be to put all script files at the bottom of the page. Any massive scripts placed at the top will prevent displaying of the page until they are fully loaded. However you ought to still keep the scripts that are necessary for proper page functionality at the top because user will start using the page as soon as they see it & you might run in to some issues. Another strategy would be to place scripts that are used on other pages at the bottom of the preliminary page. That way they would be obtainable right away without additional request.
Combining all of the above techniques will speed up & increase success of your net site.
All of the above techniques are a brief summary of original research by Steve Souders. He describes all of them in more details in his book "High Performance Web Sites".
The fact is that an average of 10-20% of the finish user response time involves retrieving website's HTML page where the other 80-90% involves downloading of stylesheets, scripts, images, flash files and other types of net site parts. So what can they do to reduce that time to a maximum? of the first steps is to make fewer HTTP requests.
way to accomplish fewer HTTP requests is to make use of CSS Sprites. CSS sprites let you combine images in to picture and using stylesheets offset that main picture to show different parts of that main picture. Imagine a scenario where you have a web-site with hundreds of small icons representing all kinds of things. For different pages containing a number of those icons your browser would make additional requests to download them unless those icons are already in browser's cache. Having the picture preloaded at the preliminary page would eliminate all those unnecessary requests later on.
The other way would be to combine your scripts and stylesheets. In lieu of loading ten different stylesheets or scripts you could load of each. You could accomplish that in variety different ways where a number of them would be using htaccess file and other ones using dynamic stylesheets.
In the event you own or manage an very large portal and have some funds to spend, the second step to reduce the loading times of your net site would be to make use of content delivery network (CDN). The basic idea of CDN is that it hosts all of your website's parts on a different servers in multiple locations based on propinquity to the user, to deliver your content more effectively. That way your web server only serves the actual HTML page and all other assets such as images, scripts and stylesheets are delivered from close CDN servers.
Third step would be to add an expires header for your stylesheets, scripts, images and static pages. That will make user browser cache those parts meaning the next time the same page or asset gets requested, they are used straight from the browsers cache eliminating unnecessary requests. In the event you are in a situation where you constantly update your scripts or stylesheets you could always implement a dynamic way of updating their filename. eg. (/css/v1/main.css, /css/v2/main.css). That would make sure user's browser would re-download the updated asset on change and use cached version otherwise.
Fourth step to lightning fast sites would be to make use of gzip parts. Currently the most popular & free compression system is Gzip. The only parts you ought to be concerned with are stylesheets & scripts. You ought to not gzip your sites images because they are already compressed. Gzipping your sites parts will reduce their download times up to 50%.
Fifth step would be to place your stylesheets at the top. That would enable what its called progressive rendering. On a slower connections the things such as header, navigation page contents & then the footer will appear in sequence after the other until the whole page is loaded. Having a stylesheet placed at the bottom will prevent displaying of those elements until the whole stylesheet is loaded.
Seventh important step would be to minify your javascript files. The system strictly consists of removing white spaces & comments resulting is smaller file sizes. are number of scripts online that could do that job for you.
Sixth step to net site optimization would be to put all script files at the bottom of the page. Any massive scripts placed at the top will prevent displaying of the page until they are fully loaded. However you ought to still keep the scripts that are necessary for proper page functionality at the top because user will start using the page as soon as they see it & you might run in to some issues. Another strategy would be to place scripts that are used on other pages at the bottom of the preliminary page. That way they would be obtainable right away without additional request.
Combining all of the above techniques will speed up & increase success of your net site.
All of the above techniques are a brief summary of original research by Steve Souders. He describes all of them in more details in his book "High Performance Web Sites".
