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Improve Web Page Performance
by
15 Sep 2009
Rating:
 (2 votes
- 3.00 average) Competition is increasing on the Web. If your site is slow you will lose to your competitors. To improve web page performance (speed), you can do a number of things:
As you are aware, today's browsers are faster than earlier versions. They have changed functionality to help improve speed. By understanding how browsers function, you will be able to increase your web page performance. Learn everything that you can about browser functionality.... http://www.browserscope.org/ is a great resource that charts how different browsers function. The Easiest Thing You Can Do To Improve Web Page Performance:
 Read more about how <tables> affect speed... How Design Affects Performance : Progressive Rendering Additional information... How Design Affects Performance Increase Download Parallelization - Use A CDN Such As Amazon S3: Increase download parallelization by increasing the number of resources that serves static files. In other words, if you have many static objects* on a page split them across multiple domains. *static files - includes stylesheets, images, swf, etc The reason why this works is because each browser allows a maximum number of connections per hostname. In modern browsers, this number has increased to 6 (avg). What this means is that your browser will try to download 6 objects from any hostname at the same time. So if you increase the number of resources that serve static files it's more likely that you will decrease page display time. In comparison, older browsers such as IE 6 only allowed 2 maximum connections per hostname. Move all your static files to a CDN such as http://aws.amazon.com/s3/. Doing so will provide you with the following:
I recommend using a different domain other than your site domain. The reason behind this is that you don't want your cookies associated with each static file.
Getting Started I elect to use .info domain for static files as they are offered on the cheap - $1.99. For example, if your site domain is domain.com ; you should purchase domain-file.info to serve your static files. (Note: It can be any domain just as long as it's different from your site.) Setting Up Your Domain Once you get your domain you can point it to your amazon s3 server account (url). This is done by adding a CNAME entry for each sub-domain that you want to create. I created the following sub-domains:
Whatever you use - make sure that you can alter headers. You will need to add EXPIRES header so that the static files are cached - saving you bandwidth and decreasing overall page display time. Other Things You Can Do To Speed Up Your Pages (in no particular order):
To further decrease page display time, I recommend compressing (gzip) your js and css files. You will then have to create a plugin to show the gzip version if browser is capable of displaying if not show the uncompressed version. Most modern browsers are capable of displaying compressed files. However, IE6 is known to have some issues - yes, even the SP2 which was reported to have this fixed is still buggy. Tools To Help You Get Started
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