My New Geek Heroes
Color Theory For Web Designers
Making Seamless Backgrounds
The speed at which a web page loads is a delivery of service. A slow website not only frustrates users (an increasing number of whom will abandon your site as the seconds tick by) but also lowers your ranking in search results (Google includes page load speed as part of its algorithm) and potentially increases your costs, if you are paying for site traffic.
As a broad and general rule, assume that every visitor to your site has ADD. Every page must have a load time under eight seconds. That time should be less than five seconds, and ideally under two seconds.
Optimizing a site for speed is a seven-step process, the first five of which are applicable to every web page:
- Set a performance baseline by testing the load time of existing pages, whether those pages are offline or hosted on a server.
- Redesign and recode your pages for speed.
- Minimize file sizes by shaving off every excess byte.
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests.
- Use intelligent compression and caching.
- Cojoin, defer, optimize and make asynchronous any JavaScript.
- Optimize MySQL queries.
Each of these steps will be explained in a separate upcoming article.
Yep! That's two of the tools I will be suggesting for use in the first step, Ian - thanks!
so we don't need the jQuery minimum length anymore:) cool!
