By Vakeesan Rajadurai, Senior Project Manager
Speed matters. With the internet dominating the business world, securing a good position with the search engines is not a matter of chance or twist of fate, but of comprehensive research and keen analysis.
Everybody expects a fast web experience. Everyone can relate to the frustration of waiting on a site that takes forever to load. Website owners in particular should care about performance when designing and developing a site.
This blog post will cover Optimizing website for Speed and Traffic.
Lesson from the Obamacare website crash
Recent web failures like the highly publicized crash of Obamacare website have put unfortunate businesses in the spotlight and the lucky ones on high alert. Even companies with sterling web availability records, like Google and Yahoo have fallen victim to often unavoidable, yet very public outages.
Websites are simply failing more and more these days and the world is noticing. With more and more websites failing recently there arises a need to test the speed and traffic of a website.
Improving your site’s performance is the easiest way to increase pageviews, conversions, revenues and sales. For example, Yahoo found that a 400ms improvement to the speed of their site increased their pageviews by 9%. Firefox shaved 2.2 seconds off their average page load time and increased download conversions by 15.4%. Shopzilla reduced their loading time from 7 seconds to 2 and increased their pageviews by 25% and revenue by 7-12%.
Website Speed Optimization basics
Website Speed Optimization focuses on reducing website loading time by tuning the webpages and images that are loaded on the site. A typical speed optimization initiative will:
- Test the websites URL in other locations and use Adblock, HTTP Auth., and Cookie options.
- Simulate page loads on a Dial-Up, 2G, 3G, DSL or Cable connection. Ensure that your site is accessible to your targeted audience. .
- Pinpoint load issues, latency differences and see how the page loads in different regions. View the page load in the eyes of the targeted audiences.
- We will test the site on an actual Android device and check its performance. We also ensure that pages loads optimally for mobile users.
5 Best practices for speeding up your website
If you are looking to invest more effort into optimizing your website’s performance, we suggest you follow these best practices:
- Minimize HTTP requests – Combined files are a way to reduce the HTTP requests. Consolidate images files, HTML, CSS and the Javascript files.
- Use a content delivery network – User’s proximity to your web server has an impact on response time. Remember that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Using a content delivery network where we have web servers, databases in distributed network may double the load speed.
- Add expiry dates for headers – Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, style sheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cache-able. BY doing so, you avoid unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.
- Avoid redirects – Redirects are accomplished using the 301 and 302 status codes. The main thing to remember is that redirects slow down the user experience. Inserting a redirect between the user and the HTML document delays everything in the page since nothing in the page can be rendered and no components can start being downloaded until the HTML document has arrived.
About Dextrys
Dextrys is a US-based software outsourcing company providing Web, Mobile, Desktop, Cloud based development, SEO and Testing solutions to clients worldwide. We can help you develop a faster, more efficient and all-around improved website experience for your users.
To know more about Dextrys and the services we offer please visit http://www.dextrys.com
