Web Site Tuning – Speed up your web pages

Ever wonder why some sites take forever to load while others appear in a snap? Let alone the associated user experience. It’s just more fun browsing a site that loads fast. And since Google now rates Adsense weight by load times, it makes more sense than ever to ensure that our pages load as fast as possible.

Especially with high performance websites, page load times are of highest concern. Not only user experience is directly affected, but bandwidth and hardware costs are often directly related to it. Yahoo did a marvelous job researching the elements that affect page loads and in response created the utility yslow.

These are the top 10 Rules to reduce page load times, as a result of Yahoo’s research:

• make rewer HTTP requests
  • CSS sprites
  • combine js scripts, css files
  • use image maps
  • use inline images (not compatible in IE)
• use a CDN
• add an Expires header
• gzip components
• put stylesheet at the top
  • IE render page upon receipt of the stylesheet
  • FF renders immediately
  • avoid using @import, use LINK instead
• place scripts at the bottom
  • scripts block parallel downloads across hosts
  • scripts block rendering of everything below them
• make JS and CSS external
  • makes them cacheable
  • can be served from CDN
• minify JavaScript
• avoid redirects
• make AJAX cacheable
• split content domains or hostnames
• reduce cookie weight
• make static content cookie free
• minify CSS
• use iframes wisely as they are expensive to load times
• optimize images

Yslow and Firebug are two terriffic tools to research load sequences and pinpoint issues. Use them and follow these rules and your site should be off to the races.