Secret Tips To Speeding Up Your Web Site

By Author: Amy Armitage
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In every profession, there are what are called "best practices," a term that means just what it clearly implies, that is, the "best way to do things." In the case of web development, these "best practices and ways" evolved into the generally accepted, front-end rules we encounter today in Google's Performance Best Practices. There are numerous ways to assess and revise your web pages vis-a-vis these rules, but Google took it one step further by creating a Firefox/Firebug Add-on named, appropriately enough, Page Speed to do all the grunt work for you. These secret tips to speeding up your web site all come from a single secret weapon-Page Speed!

Page Speed profiling

When you evaluate a web page with it, the Page Speed tool looks at how well the page conforms to a range of rules. It measures performance from the client's POV (Point Of View) as "page load time." This is the time that elapses between the user requesting a new page and the page being fully displayed in the browser. The various best practices cover many actions that affect page load time, including

- resolving DNS names,
- establishing TCP ...
... connections,
- downloading resources and fetching others from cache,
- sending HTTP requests,
- parsing/executing scripts and
- rendering page objects and images.

Page Speed will report on how well your pages eliminate these steps, optimize them and/or combine ("parallelize") some, all to save time. Best practices are grouped into five categories covering all the aspects of page load optimization.

1. Optimize caching

Web pages typically include from a few to many resources that are unchanging-CSS files, images, JavaScript, etc. HTTP caching allows browsers to save these elements. Once cached, a browser can use the local copy (instead of downloading it again) on future visits to the same page. Caching, therefore, is doubly effective, as you reduce round-trip time (see below) by avoiding unnecessary HTTP requests and reducing the payload size (see below) of responses.

2. Reduce round-trip times
Round-trip time (RTT) is simply the time it takes for a user to send her request and the server to return a response, or "back-and-forth" time. It excludes the time it takes to fully download the bytes transferred, so it is unrelated to bandwidth. For browsers to make their first-time connections with a server, it takes a minimum of three RTTs: the first for DNS name resolution, the second for TCP connection and the third for the HTTP request (plus first byte of the HTTP response). Some web pages require literally dozens of RTTs. Therefore, minimizing the number of round-trips is critically important for speeding up web page performance, so you should minimize the number of requests and "parallelize" them whenever possible.

3. Minimize request size

HTTP requests have to take the associated cookies for that domain and path along with them. Almost all users have asymmetric Internet connections where the download speed is four to 20 times faster than upload speed. In the worst case, then, a 500 byte HTTP header request might take as long to upload as 10KB of response data would to download. Worse yet, HTTP headers are sent uncompressed. After all is said and done (and Page Speed has said it and done it to your pages), the best way to reduce client request time is to cut down the number of bytes to be uploaded as cookie data.

4. Minimize payload size

Reducing payload size of both your dynamic and static resources can dramatically reduce network latency. Also, cutting down the byte size of cached scripts lets the browser speed up parsing and execution of the code needed for page rendering.

5. Optimize browser rendering

Once all of the "page assets" are downloaded to the user's computer, the browser has to save, structure, load, interpret and render the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. Formatting your code and designing your pages in the specific ways that best exploit the capabilities of the current crop of browsers is a straightforward way to speed the reception and display of your web page on the user's desktop computer, laptop, PDA or even cell phone!

Page Speed is available free of charge from Google. Beyond the coding suggestions, there are a number of things you can do to minimize the disk storage size of the images you use on your web pages. You should always save the image as the proper size, that is, the size you will have it in your layout. This will save your browser the trouble of scaling the image on the fly, which wastes time in redraws and "travel time" (see #2, above).

In fact, you should use every tip, trick, tool and technique you can find to reduce file sizes on disk, speed rendering on screen and keep regularly-used web assets cached and ready to roll. With Page Speed and some determination, sluggish pages will be a thing of the past. With the accelerating rush of technological advancement, things end up in "the past" a lot faster than they used to and, as far as slow-loading web pages go, good riddance!
About Author:
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from linux virtual private servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit online for more information.