The art of tuning a website to deliver it's content quickly and efficiently to the user over a potentially low bandwidth connection.
23
votes
5answers
2k views
Does “putting Javascript at the bottom” defeat the purpose of document.ready?
I know that it is recommended to put Javascript at the bottom of the page, but if I'm using jQuery doesn't this defeat its purpose to run as the DOM is loading?
If I have a dropdown menu, for ...
21
votes
1answer
2k views
How exactly is Google Webmaster Tools measuring “Site Performance”?
I've been working for two months now on improving our response time (mainly server side) on a new forum (a brand new product on a technical point of view) we've launched in Germany a few month ago and ...
17
votes
5answers
5k views
What is the Google Chrome equivalent to Firebug?
I'm looking for a tool that can:
inspect HTML elements
manage/debug JavaScript
profile performance
modify elements in real-time
17
votes
6answers
495 views
How do you load test your application?
What is the most effective way to load to load test your app? The main point is to determine how many users you could support at a single time with the application still running at a reasonable speed.
...
17
votes
2answers
985 views
If a page takes too long to load, after how long will a user give up and re-load or go elsewhere?
If a page takes too long to load, after how long – generally – will a user give up and re-load or go elsewhere? What studies have been done that measured page load time and user ...
13
votes
11answers
1k views
Common optimizations to reduce HTML or XHTML page size?
What are some common optimizations performed to reduce HTML or XHTML page size? Some that come to mind are:
removing comments,
removing extraneous whitespace,
moving repetitive inline styles to a ...
13
votes
7answers
389 views
What are the best ways to measure end user web site performance?
I know of a couple tools to measure end user web site performance and I'm wondering what else is out there. The two major ones I know of are yslow and Google's page speed.
12
votes
3answers
1k views
Why is loading speed of a website important for SEO?
I see everywhere on the internet how to optimize loading speed of a website but no one says why it's important for SEO.
Inevitably, there are reasons why Google has decided to take this factor into ...
11
votes
3answers
23k views
What's the best FREE CDN service available? [closed]
It seems like using CDN is a best option to provide users a great browsing experience. But, plans of the major CDN providers seem costly. So, I would like to get used to the CDN thing before I ...
10
votes
1answer
272 views
When and when not to use a CDN
I'm working on a web-application that loads a couple of small gif images onto the screen. I'm using a relative path, which means they are loaded from the same web server that serves the php page. The ...
10
votes
1answer
1k views
What is recommended minimum object size for gzip performance benefits?
I'm working on improving page speed display times, and one of the methods is to gzip content from the webserver.
Google recommends:
Note that gzipping is only beneficial for larger resources. Due ...
8
votes
7answers
4k views
Is it possible to use asynchronous google adsense, i.e. non-blocking?
I know that there is a Asynchronous method of using Google Analytics but is there something similar for adsense? I can't find one from my current searches - I was wondering whether there is a common ...
8
votes
1answer
493 views
Is there a maximum size that web pages should be kept under?
Posted this on SO before Ben Voigt was nice enough to direct me here. Anywho, here is my question:
When I say size I'm talking about bytes not pixels.
I'm curious if there is any consensus on what ...
7
votes
4answers
278 views
When is it time to move on from WordPress?
My company's blog it closing in on 30,000 posts and get around 1,000,000 visits a month. Things seem slow even though we have a good server.
At what point to you move on from WordPress or does it not ...
7
votes
4answers
971 views
How can I measure website page load times from different countries?
Recently, I migrated one of my personal projects into cloud and hosted the app on UK based servers.
I reside in Turkey and I would like to see how long it takes for my pages to load for UK based ...
7
votes
1answer
400 views
How is Apple's enormously image-heavy site served so fast?
Took a profile of the "Smart Cover" page on Apple's site using Pingdom. It's requesting 241 objects for a total page weight of 3472.6 KB! An absolute mammoth.
How does this possibly translate into ...
7
votes
2answers
222 views
Is there any way to diagnose which PHP or Perl scripts consume the most CPU time on a production server?
On a slightly under-powered server, it occasionally gets hit by lots of robots crawling simultaneously. Whilst one solution is to look into throwing more processing power at the web server, it has ...
7
votes
3answers
2k views
Which resolutions should I make a favicon in?
I understand that you can create a favicon.ico with multiple resolutions embedded.
Which resolutions should your average website support? Why?
Edit: Performance should be a consideration. I want to ...
6
votes
2answers
290 views
Web hosting providers and performance
Is there a way that we can measure performance for a host provider? If so, I would like to start this post as a wiki for everyone to chime in regarding their hosting provider.
(I want to change but ...
6
votes
2answers
419 views
Does specifying explicit image dimensions help site performance?
I ran some audits on a new web application we are about to launch. Chromium is suggesting in network utilization that a few images on our site do not have height/width dimensions explicitly declared. ...
6
votes
4answers
76 views
Are there any online tools that can help me find problems with my website?
I can run lots of performance tools on my server, but what is with problems that are only visible from the outside? Are there any tools that can help me with this?
6
votes
1answer
114 views
window.performance (Navigation Timing) - how to get this reported in “analytics way”
I have recently learned about window.performance that seems a great way to measure webapp performance using real client traffic. Is there any analytics service that is built on top of this and allows ...
6
votes
2answers
193 views
what tools are available to analyze mobile site performance?
the tool must:
1) Test the page/component load/render time.
2) Be usable on multiple devices/browsers.
3) Show results with recommendations per-device/browser
5
votes
2answers
674 views
How is this site so fast?
how is the website http://dftba.com/ so fast?
when i click a link it loads right then? what makes it work like this? how do i make it work like this on my site?
some of the objects on the site are ...
5
votes
4answers
289 views
Strategies for very fast delivery of webpages
I run a website Cucumbertown with an initial pay load of nearly 9KB zipped.
All my js is delayed loaded with requirejs and modernizer is the only exception.
Now all my webpages are Nginx cached ...
5
votes
4answers
9k views
What can you do to speed up IIS 7 web sites?
Turn on compression and you'll see immediate performance improvements, likewise if you enable caching for complex web apps.
What other configuration options you can change to improve performance? do ...
5
votes
2answers
163 views
Do heavy graphics and/or a high load time affect a site's search rankings?
Does the use of heavy graphics/images (with img tag or in the CSS) effect a site's Google ranking?
Sometimes sites are heavy because of the images used or Flash or lots of JavaScript - making the ...
5
votes
1answer
99 views
How much attention should I pay to page-load metrics?
My site scores a D in YSlow. How important is it that I get it up to say a B or an A?
I feel the page already loads quickly. I tested it at home on a modest 512k connection and it loaded in an ...
4
votes
5answers
278 views
Do user names used for login need to be unique?
Assuming a non-commercial site where users login with a user name and pw, do I need to enforce unicity of usernames?
Note: The db will use a separate unique index to identify the users.
The site is ...
4
votes
2answers
293 views
CDN for authenticated sites
We have a site that requires users to sign into. Typical stuff. Today, all the content (dynamic and static) is behind the login process, and you cannot access any of the pages or files via a URL ...
4
votes
2answers
179 views
Adding Google +1 Button Slows Page Load Time
This article says Google +1 tags can add a second to page load time, which means a 10% decline in visitors.
The article authors say they use smart tag loading to reduce page load time.
Does anyone ...
4
votes
2answers
2k views
How To Move From WordPress To GitHub Pages?
I'm considering moving my blog, Dream In Tech, which is WordPress CMS running on my Rackspace Cloud Server, to GitHub Pages because I'm starting to have performance issues, but how to move the posts, ...
4
votes
2answers
362 views
Actual page load time vs. perceived one
You know how all around the web, people are pushing for smaller and smaller page load times ? They do so with good reason, especially with Google now factoring it in in their way to rank pages. It's ...
4
votes
3answers
380 views
Webmaster tools site performance - reliable measurements
I am measuring a few sites and use both webmaster tools and analytics to track various aspects. One of the aspects I try to measure and track is performance.
I am getting a much more reliable ...
4
votes
2answers
344 views
CDN solutions pros and cons
As the sysadmin in our organization I've been asked to look into CDN solutions as we have plans to roll out a web platform that is targeted at developing countries. Here is my research so far on the ...
4
votes
2answers
1k views
How does server connection speed affect website performance?
A web host I'm considering quotes their server connection speed for their basic package as '15Mb/s burstable.' They offer an upgrade to a more expensive package with a '35Mb/s burstable' speed.
I ...
4
votes
1answer
205 views
jQuery/AJAX on old Computers/Browsers
I am working on a plattform that will have a lot of users in the so called "developing countries". So many of them will be using old computers and old browsers in tiny internet cafes.
We want to make ...
4
votes
1answer
101 views
What percent of visitors should click on the next page before you enable prefetching?
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome support prefetching via an HTML tag:
<!-- in chrome -->
<link rel="prerender" href="http://example.org/index.html">
I suppose it is always worthwhile ...
3
votes
2answers
1k views
is it true that CloudFlare really doesn't affect dynamic content?
I've been reading the CloudFlare FAQ, I understand that is acts as a reverse proxy
and all requests to your domain will go through CloudFlare.
They say in the FAQ that it won't slow down dynamic ...
3
votes
4answers
251 views
WordPress MySQL Performance
I have a website (www.americanbankingnews.com) that gets 40,000-50,000 page views today. It's currently sitting on a dedicated quad-core Xeon server with 8GB of ram. The site is powered by WordPress ...
3
votes
2answers
557 views
Is it good to refresh a page after a fixed interval?
I seen many sites which are refreshing their pages after a fixed interval. Sometimes it is 1-2 mins only.
If i refresh a page after every 5 mins. It'll helpful to notify user with updated contents.
...
3
votes
1answer
295 views
Page Speed Online vs Chrome Extension
In optimizing a content blog of mine with the goal of achieving the highest page speed score possible for obvious reasons (user experience, SEO, etc..), the results I'm obtaining are throwing me for a ...
3
votes
2answers
400 views
One JS/CSS bundle Vs. One with default and one with custom
On a few of my sites, we use Javascript/CSS bundles to reduce load time. I've always used two bundles for each type (4 in total) so I have
JS Bundle 1: Contains scripts that are standard on every ...
3
votes
4answers
675 views
How to replay traffic to web server from logs to profile / benchmark web app under real load?
Is there a way to get recorder real network traffic to web server, e.g. from web server logs (Apache), and replay this traffic to either profile web application (in Perl) under real load, or benchmark ...
3
votes
2answers
134 views
Shared to Dedicated or Amazon CloudFront to improve performances and keep secured?
I have a Wordpress which currently takes about 1.8s to 2.5s for the home page to completely load in my country. The page weight is about 700Ko (static content included).
In order to increase ...
3
votes
2answers
136 views
How is fluid theme's impact on rendering performance?
I am new to responsive design and now re-making a template to make it more responsive. This involves redefining many fixed width and fonts as context-dependent percentage (% or em) instead of pixels ...
3
votes
1answer
518 views
SEO for images: can I use a different (cookieless) domain?
We want to increase the value of some of our important images by means of SEO, and
we want to start serving them from a different, i.e. cookieless, domain.
We want to go from ...
3
votes
3answers
704 views
Track page size of web app for performance
I'm about to start trialling optimisations on my web application (apache & tomcat). My main interest right now is:
The total page size (including external js files such as jquery)
The number of ...
3
votes
3answers
995 views
Where to store large amounts of images for my site?
If i would want to deploy a site, like ebay, where people will be able to sell something, i would need to store large amounts of images, like many thausends of them and i would need to display about ...
3
votes
2answers
145 views
What is the easiest and fastest way to get statistics of a webservice response time?
I implemented a webservice with node.js and want to test its response time. I don't just want to do the test with one connection attempt, but I want statistics about multiple attempts, telling me the ...
