Making The Web Faster
Thu ,29/10/2009
Can you imagine logging on to your computer to find that every web page loads instantly? This may become reality as webmasters and organizations around the world are coming up with solutions to make the web faster.
There are many things that affect page load time: connection speed of the end user, the browser, the hosting environment and different elements of a web page. Google’s recent initiative to “Make the Web Faster” showcases several optimization techniques that can be applied to your web site to improve load time.
Each time a web page is requested, the browser makes several HTTP requests to the server to fetch HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images and other elements. A good rule of thumb to make a web page load faster is to reduce the number of browser requests. When you reduce the number of requests, the user’s browser spends less time downloading and rendering these elements, thus greatly improving the load time of your web site. One easy way to do this is to combine all your scripts into a single file.
There is a great tool to measure page load time and HTTP requests at: webpagetest.org. It allows you to choose the location you’d like the test run from, and you can also to configure it to emulate different connection speeds such as dialup and DSL.
Recently, we had the opportunity to redesign a web site for one of our clients. Their main complaint was the page load times, which were at 45 seconds. Using these optimization techniques, we reduced the page load time to just 3 seconds!