10 Tips for Faster Page Load Times – Improving Website Performance
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Let’s remember two things about faster page load times. First, your first-time visitors don’t like it when they’re waiting for a page to load, not to mention repeat visitors. A faster page load time screams efficient, while a slow page load time whispers ‘rookie’ site and ‘I’m outta here, can’t wait’. Second, let’s not forget our friends at Google and their omnipotent Quality Score. Last year (2008), Google announced their algorithms will take into account slow loading pages as a hit to that page’s quality score, and we all know that means higher cost-per-click on the paid search side of the business and lower rankings on the organic side.
So? How can you speed up your page load times? A number of ways, but primarily it’s focusing on the front-end development (FED) and key to faster page load times is to optimize for primed cache AND empty cache.
Here are “10 Rules to Code By To Improve Page Load Speeds and Improve User Experience for your Website Visitors”. And, for good measure there’s an additional four (4) bonus tips that should not be scoffed at either. Any ONE of these actions can dramatically improve your page load speed. Here we go:
- 1. Make fewer HTTP requests:
Use CSS Sprites – combine all background images into one; combine multiple HTTP requests into one; Same for CSS style sheets – combine them; if you have three separate icons next to each other, make them one image map; inline images.
2. USE CDN (Content Delivery Network):
Eg. Akamai, SAVVIS, Limelight, Panther Express…)
3. Add an Expires Header
Expires header is not just for images. Use it for stylesheets and scripts too! Use a far future date like 2012 and those items will be cached as well! Use it for all static assets and they’ll be read off the user’s hard drive/disk.
4. Gzip components
5. Put Stylesheets at the top of the page
6. Move scripts to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS lookups
10.Minify JS
Following are additional tips, but the above 10 are the most important and are ranked in order of importance.
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- 4 BONUS Tips to Improve Website Performance
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- 1. Avoid redirects
2. Remove Duplicate Scripts
3. Configure ETags
4. Make AJAX cacheable
Category SEM | Tags: Tags: FED, Page Load Speed, Quality Score,
