subject: Performance of a website [print this page] Performance of a website Performance of a website
Website performance is an extremely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are possessed with it. For the Goggles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBay's, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost profits and status. In your case, annoying a few users wouldn't be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you'd better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.
Even if you don't have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are overriding the Web nowadays less with fat connections and immense computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow websiteto load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second.
You can do innumerable things to make a website perform well, and much of it requires in-depth knowledge and boring testing and research. I am sure a prospective market exists for website performance optimization, much like there is one now for search engine optimization (SEO)Interestingly, Google recently announced that it will factor performance into its search ranking, so this is already happening. That said, you can do a lot of things without having to pay someone to point out the evident.
Performance Blockers:
Performance can be measured in various ways. One way is technical: seeing how fast a page loads and how many bytes are transferred. Another is perceived performance, which ties into usability testing. This can only be measured by testing with users and seeing how satisfied they are with the speed of your the good news (and hard truth) about performance is that 80 to 90% of poor performance happens in the front end. Once the browser gets the HTML, the server is done and the back-end developer can do nothing more. The browser then starts doing things to our HTML, and we are at its mercy. This means that to achieve peak performance, we have to optimize our JavaScript, images, CSS and HTML, as well as the back end.
So here are the things that slow down your page the most.
External Resources:
The browser opens up the Internet's address book and looks up the number associated with the name of the server that's holding the things you want (i.e. its DNSentry).
It then negotiates a delivery.
It receives the delivery (waiting for all the bytes to come in).
It tries to understand what was sent through and displays it.
Every request is costly and slows down the loading of the page. This is also caused by browsers loading things in chunks (usually four at a time) rather than all at the same time. This is akin to ordering a product from a Website, choosing the cheapest delivery option and not being at home between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. If you include several JavaScript libraries because you like a certain widget in each, then you'll double, triple or even quadruple the time that your page takes to load and display
