When you are using your website to reach out to your prospective customers, the website has to make a great impact. It is necessary that your website has an optimal loading time and overall performance, even for the slower Internet connections. If your website responds slowly to the visitor, there is bound to be a feeling of not getting enough, of what is expected. Now days with the advancements in the field, the speed on the Internet superhighway is expected to be substantial. When you develop your website, keep in mind that you have to work continuously and maintain the site to provide enhanced page performance.
When you encounter this issue of slow web sites, there could be various reasons for it. Many times, the solution sought in the first place is reducing the file size of most of the files. A typical solution often taken up for discussion is to reduce the size of the JavaScript libraries. Likewise, there are other factors as well, that lead to the reduction in the response time of a web page. The HTML document is very relevant and needs to be checked. If there are heavy HTML files, then it can surely affect the performance. If there are too many complexities in the document, then they take longer to render than simpler pages would usually do. It is necessary to optimize HTML and dependencies without losing quality. Removing comments and unnecessary line breaks from the HTML page can be of some help. However, you can keep these comments accessible for maintenance purpose, which you may need some in the source documents. You can reduce dependencies like these by reducing the amount of files that are included. Wherever possible combine several scripts into one include.
Similarly, the file size of the documents required to enhance page utility like various image files, multimedia elements and even the scripts, is also a factor. Typically the image files, as well as video or audio files that you add to the page are responsible for increasing the page size. These take longer to load on slower Internet connections and thus are a drawback in page performance. You can use CSS sprint techniques to load all images at the same time. If you define dimensions for images on their container elements, it can help ensure rendering of the page correctly, thereby ensuring that there is no jumping around, when images are loading. You can also use PHP script, when you want to collate several scripts or CSS style sheets into a single file. It is easy to use and can cache the collated file till you make many changes to any included file. This helps your files to be automatically packed and cached and included file also gets updated, when you change them. This helps in maintenance, as well as improvement in page performance.
If you include large dependencies at the end of the document, it is better, as the rest of the page will at least get shown first before browser loads them. Even the JavaScript should not be put in the header, as it lowers the speed. If you are using any third party content from their server, then it is better, if you can use RSS feeds locally instead. You need not deal with their DNS server delays nor have to be affected by its down times.
There are different techniques that you may use to enhance page performance. This is a very basic idea of some of the techniques available. You can select those that match your requirements.