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10base TomWhile more and more people are using faster Internet connections, there seems to be less emphasis by web developers on optimizing pages for faster load times. We're seeing more and more widgets and javascript-heavy pages that take a long time to load, even on fast Internet connections. It's a breath of fresh air when a website loads quickly and cleanly.
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15 Quick Ways to Shrink Page Load Times
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Faster pages make a better user experience.
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Here are some great methods and tools to ensure your site is running quickly and smoothly.
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1. A basic site analyzer
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Web Page Analyzer to check for general errors and seeing the “health” of my site in terms of load times. The analyzer shows tons of information about how many scripts you have, total file size, and many other things that factor into load time.
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2. Pingdom
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Pingdom is a nifty site that allows you to check for broken images and paths, as well as loading time for all of your images and scripts. Broken paths and images can be a major load time killer.
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3. Host files locally
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While this may take a bit more bandwidth for your servers, you’ll gain a lot of speed by not having to go out into the web to find the image. Instead of using services like Flickr to host your images, put them on your own server and save the time spent for the browser to travel to flickr.com and download the image. Local files almost always load faster than external files
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4. Use image heights and widths
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Here’s a sample of a correctly tagged image with height and width tags:
<img src="images/mine.gif" border="0" alt="my image" width=”125″ height=”250″ />Adding width and height tags to images can make a huge difference when the web browser loads the page. If the browser knows the width and height, it can go right on past the image and let it load in the background while it renders the rest of the page. If an image doesn’t have these tags, the browser has to wait until the image loads before it can go on loading the rest of the page.
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5. Reduce widgets
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6. Use static caching
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Taking pages written in dynamic languages like php and turning the result into a static web page. Web servers are incredibly good at serving static files. By turning your dynamic pages into static pages, you’ll reduce load on your server and greatly improve page loading times.
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7. Accelerators
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8. Firebug
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9. CSS shrinker
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- white spaces
- line breaks
- remove unnecessary charachters
Smaller external scripts like javascript and CSS can make a big difference in load times. Try using online services like CSS clean to take your CSS source and strip things like
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10. Server from multiple domains
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If you’re serving a lot of web objects on a page, it might be a good idea to utilize multiple domains for serving the content, like server.example.com, server2.example.com, etc. You can only have a limited number of connections sent to the web browser at a time. By using multiple domains (even if they’re using the same IP address) you can download objects at the same time, where on a single server you’d have to load one at a time.
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11. Cut back on cookies
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Extra cookies that are set on the user’s browser adds time to each page load. Make sure that you’re only using the smallest possible number of cookies, and also try optimizing cookie usage
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12. Use a different domain for cookie-free resources
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13. Shrink your javascript
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Using services like Dean Edward’s packer can strip out unwanted line breaks, characters, and other redundant code in your javascript files.
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14. Combine javascript files
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As a general rule, downloading lots of small scripts takes longer than downloading one large script. If you can combine your javascripts into one large file, you’ll see faster download times. The easiest way to do this (without using programming knowledge) is to physically open your javascript files and copy and paste all of the javascript into one file. However, this isn’t always the easiest option, so here are a few resources that show how you can merge javascript files dynamically.
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15. Use a content delivery network
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CDNs allow you to use servers from around the world, depending on where the user is from.
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