Page Loading Time
Category: On-site Value
Importance Level: 3/5
Best Practice: Improve loading time as faster websites are liked by people and thus search engines.
Some of the best tools available in the web that we have used are listed below
- Google Developers (free & most followed)
- Pingdom
- web page test
- GT Metrix
- Website Optimization
Page load speed is a metric should be improve in order to improve the overall user experience. Below mentioned are 7 best practices to help decrease your website load time, to create a rich user experience.
- Minimize HTTP Requests - Your pages will load faster if they have to wait for fewer HTTP requests. This means reducing the number of items that need to be loaded, such as scripts, style sheets, and images. (sources:moz.com)
- Combine all CSS into an external files & link to it from the <head> section each page instead of loading it in the HTML of a page. This allows the external page to be cached so that it loads faster. JavaScript should be handled in a similar fashion as CSS.
- Use CSS sprites to combine images used in background into one image (CSS Sprites allows unlimited number of pages to be combined to one) to reduce number of HTTP requests. [In website optimization too, the 80-20 rule applies where 80% of the time is spent in only 20% of the code optimization comprising of HTML document (apache, C++, databases, etc.) but those parts only contribute to about 20% of the user’s response time. It’s better to focus on optimizing the parts that contribute to the other 80% (comprising of images, scripts and stylesheets)
- Images used in the website should be optimized for web (Optimized png using photoShop)
- Zipping files - using Gzip to compress size of the page sent to the browser
- Using CDN allow visitors to download information in parallel, resulting the site load faster. CDNs are becoming increasingly affordable with services like Amazon CloudFront
- Reducing 301 redirect - this can be a little tricky for website migration.