Saurabh Says

Website speed can make or break your business. On one side it makes it easy for your web visitor to get the information quickly, on the other side it helps you gain those crucial points in SEO. Google gives preference to faster sites and may penalize you for having slow website.

Firstly to figure out whether your website is slow or not you need to use some of the online available tools. The tools that I like the most are following:

HTML Validator:  http://validator.w3.org/

It will validate your webpage and come up with possible suggestions on how to fix errors.  Its important that you don’t have errors in webpage.

Google Insight:  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Run it on your webpage and it will come up with all the suggestions that you can do to improve your website speed. Be it gzip, minify, caching etc; Google insight will check all those small points and tell you what you need to do reduce those extra bytes or minutes from your webpage.

Webpage Test:  http://www.webpagetest.org/

The only thing Google Insight doesnt do is to tell you how fast your page loads in terms of time. Different browser and different locations will load your same webpage in different time. www.webpagetest.org can load your page in different browsers from different locations and tell you how fast it will load in real scenario.  It also tells you how fast each of the component loads (java script, images, css etc).

Once you have figured these things out, you can get to actual task of understanding each aspect of website speed optimization. We will now cover most of the aspects of website speed.

1) Avoid CSS @import:

Always avoid using import of style sheet into your webpage. There are two ways to include a stylesheet in your web page.

You can use the LINK tag (Correct way):

<link rel=’stylesheet’ href=’saurabhsays.css’>

Or you can use the @import rule (Incorrect way):

<style>

@import url(‘saurabhsays.css’);

</style>

The reason for this is that browser is unable to download anything in parallel when “import” is used. Hence it results in higher page load time.

2) Avoid a character set in the meta tag

Pages are loaded by sending bytes to browser from webserver over internet. Browser try to understand the encoding using various algorithms and finally render the page. To reduce this effort always specify charset in response. You can do so by putting a line similar to the following line after <header> tag

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

It will give the information to browser which charset is being used and browser doesnt have to put effort in understanding the encoding.

3) Avoid bad requests

Request data from the location which doesn’t exist is waste of time and resources. You may be trying to access data from a site which results in 404 errors. Always avoid such situations.

4) Avoid landing page redirects

Thought there is no specific rule that stops you from doing redirects on pages, it is recommended that you dont put redirects which is expected to be a direct landing page from search engines.

5) Avoid long-running scripts

if you have a perl script that runs for 15 seconds, move it to background. You can always email results to user later rather than keeping him waiting in your browser window.

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