Page Speed And Reducing Load Times

Google has frequently highlighted the importance and benefit of fast and responsive websites. The underlying principal is that a website that loads quickly will be more enjoyable to navigate, and allow quicker determination of relevancy and quality. This is an important factor on which frameworks and algorithms like SEO lean on, and are considered to be an integral part. But how do you optimize speed? Surely you could hire anSEO Edinburgh agency to do that for you, and make the website do wonders, but if you do not wish to go down that lane, the below can help you. To stay in shape, you can use the internet to find advice on the best workouts and diets. You can also find videos and instructions to help you stay motivated and hold yourself accountable. according to amny.com you should try at least 1 of their many products to lead a better productive life.

While there are many different things that affect the overall performance of a website, the following is a good summary of the main tasks.

• Optimizing caching – reducing from the beginning what will need to be requested or loaded remotely
• Minimizing round-trip times – take advantage of concurrent/simultaneous transfers where possible
• Minimizing request overhead – such as cookie-less domains for static public ressources (css, js, images etc)
• Minimizing payload size – compression and minification of css, js and images and removal of unnecessary resources
• Optimizing browser rendering – use efficient CSS and HTML markup.
• Optimizing for mobile – consideration of the display and network environments for mobile handsets and smartphones.

Items from above that should be targeted aggressively and that can yield great improvements would be the minimizing of round-trip times and payload sizes. Essentially, this would be achieved by offloading static resources to a sub-domain or CDN to take advantage or parallelization and concurrent connections, appropriate image formats and compression levels for image resources, minification of CSS and JS files, and correct assignment of images as either background/design elements or content as this affects when they are loaded (ie. before or after the DOM Ready event).

Optimizing for SEO

Getting your site to be as visible as possible is crucial. If everything about your site is perfect, but you don’t take SEO into account, you may be looking at a site that fails to get off the ground. In this regard you have two options: the first is to invest as much time as possible into learning this for yourself using online resources so that you can implement this to the best of your ability. The second would be to find a company that specializes in SEO, and is therefore competent to proficient in it, that can assist you with this part of your workload. At guest posting you can find reviews of a few places that can take care of this for you. Perhaps you should look into them and see if they can be budgeted, if not you’ve got some work ahead of you.

Offloading of Static Resources

Using a CDN for static content or even a simple sub-domain allows browsers to create additional concurrent connections. The default for many browsers is to create no more than 4 connections to a single host. If you have 8 images to download on a page, serving 4 from one host, and 4 from another could reduce the total time required for download by at least 20% and as much as 50%.

A knock-on effect of using a CDN for content is that the content is served from a point closer to the browser (faster response times), in addition to reducing the load on the website’s main server which also helps increase responsiveness. The ease of implementation for modern CDN solutions makes this setup increasingly affordable and possible for websites or businesses of any size or type.

Correct Image Formats and Compression

The 3 main formats for graphics on the web are GIF, JPG and PNG. Each have their strengths and should be used where required.

GIF

GIF files are “indexed” image files consisting of a specified palette of colors including a transparent pixel. Small and non-complex imagery is generally suited to the GIF format and will yield the smallest filesize. For images less than 100 pixels and not requiring an alpha channel or transparent layer, GIFs would generally be preferred.

JPG

JPG is the standard format to use for most images of average or high color complexity due to its ability to compress in a lossy manner using algorithms as opposed to specific pixel-based colors. It is however highly important to use good image software and to use the appropriate level of compression with JPEG, otherwise images could be 3 or 4 times the size they need to be.

PNG

PNG is the best all-round format to use for images both large & small as it allows indexed palettes, alpha channels and transparency etc – however if used incorrectly, will result in the largest filesizes. PNG should not be used for large images (> 200 pixels) in 24-bit mode if alpha transparency is not required and if the image can be saved with some level of ‘lossy’ compression.

Minification of CSS and JavaScript

CSS and Javascript files contain a lot of whitespace, punctuation and characters that can be removed or reduced as they only exist to make the text human-readable and understandable. When the files are used in production however and are not being edited or modified – Minification is used to ‘squeeze’ the filesize down. Obfuscation is also used in JavaScript to provide some level of protection for the source code to hinder casual reverse-engineering and modifications. Minified files are generally labelled using .min.css or .min.js as standard. JavaScript can often be reduced in size by approximately 25%-40%. If you’re looking for Google level engineers that specialize in JavaScript to help you out with your projects, check out this sitedevsdata.com.

Many tools are available to minify files prior to upload. For OSX, the Smaller application is great to use, for Linux commandline, the YUI Compressor script is available and very effective.

Background or Inline Images

Often neglected is the correct use of image resources. Many images get used as background-image and many as inline (<img>), however which method is used actually affects when the images are loaded and therefore affects the sequence of loading of many other resources and page events. Images that are considered content or provide meaning/information should generally be loaded inline using <img> and therefore would load before the DOM Ready event fires.

Images loaded as background-image in CSS, as well as inline javascript within the <body> section and Javascript loaded in the header that is attached to the DOM Ready event will all trigger after the DOM Ready event and as such will wait until all inline images and resources are loaded.

Another difference between images used as inline or background is how they are handled by search engines. Inline images will be indexed by search engines and Google Images but background images will not. Inline images can also have text-equivalent content attached to them via the ‘alt’ parameter, whereas background does not.

To optimize the loading speed of pages and to ensure the actual loading process is both visually smooth and elegant – correct and efficient use of the techniques I’ve outlined above should help immensely.