Increasing site speed/performance

Improve user experience and conversion rates by speeding up your site.
“Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, according to a Google study. The same article reports Amazon found that every additional 100 milliseconds of load time decreased sales by 1 percent. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave.” – Source: Lara Swanson, A List Apart

Testing Sites

The above sites will give you a pretty good idea of where your site ranks overall in terms of speed. They’ll also give you a detailed breakdown on what’s slowing your site down and where to focus your performance optimization efforts.

Images

In many cases improper handling of images can slow your site down drastically. One main offender is the placement of hi-res images on your site which are then re-sized down to a smaller size on the fly. The correct method being to re-size them in an image program first before adding them to your site. Another mistake is simply not saving the images with enough compression or any at all. Both cases result in loading images which are larger in file size (kb) than necessary. Another issue is the use of images in your site layout which are unnecessary and could be avoided with coding techniques (rounded corners, box shadows, gradients etc. can all be created with coding methods now). Lastly, you can reduce the total number of images a site has to load by combining images into one file and using sprite techniques.

Other areas to look at are:

  • Reducing DNS lookups
  • Adding expiration headers
  • Optimizing requests / Avoiding bad requests
  • Minifying Code