Hot answers tagged load-time
11
1) Use CSS Sprites (This is the preferred method).
2) Load the images in a hidden div. Place the images in the div and then set the div's CSS to display: none; to hide it.
3) Load the images with CSS:
#preloadedImages
{
width: 0px;
height: 0px;
display: inline;
background-image: url(path/to/image1.png);
background-image: ...
10
Jakob Nielsen has an excellent article, Website Response Times (June 21, 2010) in which he explains why website response times still matter.
0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response — that is, the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct ...
10
I don't really like the javascript solution - it's messy, difficult to maintain, and of course completely fails when JS is disabled.
The modern solution is to use CSS Sprites - try it, believe me, you'll wonder why you never did this before ;)
8
In my experience, this is more a balance between load speed and photo quality. Given i'm a professional photographer myself, I understand this difficult challenge.
I feel that the internet has gone a long way and there are now some great techniques and tools that you can utilize to avoid this issues. None of these techniques are germane or specific to a ...
8
A couple good tools that I have run across for doing this are Pingdom Tools and BrowserMob. Of the two I like the results interface from BrowserMob the most.
5
Yes. The more HTTP requests you make, the slower your site will load. That's why Yahoo's first recommendation in 'Best Practices for Speeding up Your Website' is to minimise HTTP requests by combining CSS files:
"Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS ...
5
Yes. Each one has an overhead of an http request. However, by the looks of it you're using different style sheets for different media types, so the browser should only use them if it needs them, providing you're defining them like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="core.css"
media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" ...
4
Short answer: roughly 3 seconds for more than half of users.
In Web Performance Today's Cheat Sheet: Everything you wanted to know about web performance but were afraid to ask, the first point addressed is the effect of page-loads.
In 2006, the average online shopper expected a web page to load in 4 seconds. Today, that same shopper expects your page to ...
4
Use absolute URI's from your stylesheet and add the images from IMG tags to a hidden div on the page (this assumes you're using the same images on every page; ideally in the footer so they're all loaded and cached on any given page call).
Images on the page get priority and, once the images are cached, they'll render immediately on subsequent page requests.
...
3
TTFB is totally dependent on server load and available bandwidth.
If your server is heavily loaded (lots of requests per second) then your TTFB will rise exponentially. This effect is multiplied by lower server spec and available bandwidth.
Spreading the load over multiple sub domains may or may not have any effect, this depends on how you actually ...
3
Adding MORE (sub)domains can only INCREASE this value because the computer/visitor has to do another lookup to resolve the domain to an IP.
You'd be better off trying to find out WHY you have a high TTFB.
From Wikipedia: "Time To First Byte or TTFB is a measurement that is often used as an indication of the responsiveness of a webserver or other network ...
3
Googlebot has been able to follow links in JavaScript since 2007/2008:-
We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and
Flash to discover links to new web pages
They have been executing JavaScript since at least 2009 (I imagine they learned a lot from building Chrome), and Matt Cutts has publicly confirmed that they can follow ...
3
See the WordPress Optimization codex page.
Also, use:
CSS Sprites
CDN
3
Almost certainly no. Every network request is sent using packets usually of 1500 bytes. If the request is under 1500 bytes (including the URL, cookies etc) then it makes no difference whether it's 30 bytes or 1300 bytes. Even if a request spans 2 packets the difference would be negligible - that's definitely a micro-optimisation you don't need to do unless ...
3
Pros of CDN:
Noticeable boost in rendering time of your pages.
Relieving your server load and bandwidth usage
In general, the cons that I can think of are
Price: Even with the most affordable CDN providers you should count on something like $0.10 per GB of CDN delivery which is generally much higher than a dedicated server's bandwidth.
Possible ...
3
Paste the button JS only once at the bottom of the page and then load the HTML as many times as you want.
Try to use static links for Facebook and Twitter like on this site if you do not wan't the share count.
Use share tools like ShareThis and AddThis which have already optimized JavaScript.
Using cache to increase PageSpeed and decrease load times is very ...
3
Check into UptimeRobot http://www.uptimerobot.com It's free, offers HTTP and ping monitoring every 5 minutes with email, text and RSS notifications. To my soon to be former webhost's chagrin, it's very reliable with uptime monitoring logs and past event tracking.
3
It's a tough one to answer since you may need better hosting no matter what you do due to the sheer amount of visitors you have at once. But just like a car if you want to make it faster you throw out things you don't need which add weight to the car, by removing the weight you go faster.
So you really want to focus on reducing requests on your server by ...
2
For browsers that support the data URI type (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Uri for info) to include the image in the CSS itself.
This has a few disadvantages though:
The data is reloaded when the CSS is, rather than being separately cached, though unless your CSS changes regularly this is not much of a problem.
CSS's lack of inheritance and such ...
2
Here you will find some useful information:
http://www.w3-edge.com/weblog/2011/02/optimize-social-media-button-performance/
It explain how to speed-up things with various social buttons!
It's an article of Frederic Townsend, of W3 Total Cache plugin for Wordpress. Very interisting reading.
2
Relocating the webserver to the US will hugely improve server response time for US users. Investing in better DNS servers will also improve response time, but only for the first request.
The following analysis shows where your speed bottlenecks are at present. (Short version: most of the 1-2 seconds is the time it takes to reach the webserver, not the DNS ...
2
http://aremysitesup.com/ offers a free plan with 15 minute interval checking, or a paid plan (from $5.42/month) for 5 minute interval checking.
If you're just monitoring one site, pingdom's free account offers 1-minute interval checking -- you just need to login once every 90 days to keep it alive: https://www.pingdom.com/signup/free/ (If you're monitoring ...
2
What influences the loading of a web page?
There are a great many things that influence the loading of a web page.
The obvious ones are:
Size and number of images on page. More images means more stuff to download and render on screen.
Size of the HTML on the page. Just like above, the HTML markup has to be downloaded from the web server before the page ...
2
The good news about a 503 Service Unavailable is that the server is not too overloaded to respond. Often a a server has capacity available and can be configured to accept more requests. If you are using Apache, you could try increasing the MAX_CLIENTS setting in the configuration file. The reason that there is such a setting is that too many requests may ...
2
The speed at which webservers deliver pages usually depends on how quickly they can pull the data together from where it is stored. Here are the places that data for a website is usually stored from fastest to slowest.
In memory
On disk
In a network cache
In a database
So even when you are talking about static files on disk, it would be faster to have ...
1
30 seconds timeout is my recommendation. And I recommend you not download the entire web page html and instead should be getting just the HEAD (php example) or just the http response (php example) and then bailing. Otherwise you could be downloading megabytes of long pages which increase your time.
At the most I would recommend a max 60 seconds timeout if ...
1
If users have to login to view the dashboard page, you should have no problem with SEO since it's a private area on your site given you keep the dashboard at / Google and others would always cache and see the public version such as facebook.com's public home page vs your dashboard once logged in.
A SaaS site I had developed uses www.example.com as the ...
1
Since November 2011 The Googlebot has been able to read AJAX/javascript content, facebook, Google+ and twitter content etc. Since Matt Cutts specifically mentioned comments in his tweet I believe your content will get indexed.
Matt Cutts of Google Tweeted yesterday that “Google can now execute
AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments.” which ...
1
Selenium is a good tool for automated testing. You'll need to give it a list of random pages. You could construct this by putting a list of all 30,000 pages into an Excel spreadsheet, add another column containing the formulua =RAND() and then sorting by that column.
To measure response times you could use the Selenium timer extension.
1
mon.itor.us and SiteUptime have free/ad-supported plans. Check are only at 30-minute intervals however.
They both have plan upgrades which measure at 5 minute intervals and are cheaper than Pingdom, so you might find a reasonable cost/benefit trade-off.
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