Website performance
October 11th, 2007
Very interesting video presentation by Steve Souders regarding web site optimization on the front end. We usually focus on the back end performance by improving database, caching, http and so on while sometimes, optimizing on the front end might give a much better ROI. Steve presents 14 rules to improve user experience. Some rules are very simple and will help a lot. For example, by using CSS sprites, Yahoo! lowered the number of image requests from 16 down to just 1. This represents a lot as we’re talking about 15 extra requests hitting their firewalls, networking equipments, cache servers, http servers, fiber channel switches and appliances, and finally the disks. So as you can see, this has a lot of implications.
Other tips include compressing the data (very popular using gzip with Apache) and image caching techniques. Gzip-ing CSS is less popular but still very helpful. Putting the CSS information at the top also improves user’s perception while not improving the actual performance. Putting scripts at the end helps too as rendering is not done until the scripts are completely downloaded. This is, however not always possible.
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