Introduction to faster loading of your Website

Everyone loves a faster loading website. A website that looks simplistic yet elegant and loads blazing fast has the advantage of better crawling, more pageviews and more repeat visits. Not everyone uses a high speed Internet connection, not every one uses a faster computer that will render the page fast. So, we need to tweak a huge.

Creating a fast website is a specialized branch of web performance and maintenance now and now excellent consultants available for tweaking too.

We are are listing the best practices for making a website load faster:

• Minimize HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Add headers with expiration date or Cache-Control
• Gzip Components (Java Scripts and CSS)
• Place the styles (CSS) at the beginning
• Place Java Scripts at bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Avoid Javascript and CSS outsourcing
• Reduce DNS look up time
• Avoid redirects
• Remove duplicate scripts
• Set ETags
• Use Ajax with Cache-Control headers
• Flush the buffer early
• Delay loading certain components
• Reduce the number of DOM elements
• Split components across domains
• Minimize / avoid iframes.
• Do not use 404
• Reduce the size of Cookies
• Avoid CSS Filters
• Optimize images and use Yahoo Smush it
• Optimize style sheets (CSS)
• Do not scale images in HTML
• Use favicon.ico expiration date
• Keep individual components below 25 Kb
• Combine CSS and Java script
• Leverage browser caching
• Cache pages

We will discuss the topics individually in future.

Tools to test Page speed

1. Webpagetest
2. Firefox plugins : Firebug is the base; install Yslow and Google page
3. Google Webmaster tool to follow up

This post has been has been written as per guidelines and best practices mentioned by Yahoo!, Google, Steve Souders.