Want to improve your Web site’s performance? Where do you start? This post walks through the three main categories, and spills the beans on the five secrets to improving your Web site speed.
The history of performance
There are lots of resources on the Internet about improving your speed. Before we look at speed resources, let’s recap the history of performance tuning since the 1990s:
- 1993 – 2000: The Network – In the 1990s when the Internet took off, Web performance focused on the network – telecommunications companies rolled out broadband and fiber connecting the globe at ever-faster speeds. It was during this time companies like F5, Cisco and Citrix produced essential appliances like routers, switches and application delivery controllers that helped packets of information travel faster over the rapidly expanding Internet.
- 2001 – 2007: The Server — With high-speed network infrastructure in place, there was a huge growth in usage, which then put pressure on the Web servers to scale. During the early 2000s, we saw huge advances in server scalability with clusters, data centers and content delivery networks helping Web sites cater to the huge upswing in demand, combined with sophisticated content management systems to create content at a faster rate.
- 2008 – Now: The Client — With a fast network in place, and lots of server powers, companies began to innovate with their Web applications to compete in the online world. To compete for attention, Web designers constructed increasingly rich interfaces using JavaScript, flash/Silverlight, stylesheets and lots of images. Now the pressure is on clients – the ability for browsers to load these rich, complex Web sites fast from around the world.
This is where we are now. Lots of network capacity plus server power, but concentrating on the capabilities to load today’s Web sites fast.
Do you have a client performance problem?
The networks are fast. The servers are scalable. The final frontier of performance is client optimization.
For many people, differentiating between server performance and client performance is difficult.
Aptimize has a free online tool to help. The Web site speed test is a free online tool that measures your Web site speed and presents your with the stats that show how much of the load time is backend processing versus browser loading. With this information, you can decide where to spend your optimization effort.
Five secrets for speed
For today’s Web sites, typically 80 percent to 90 percent of the load time is client-based — the time it takes to load every JavaScript file, stylesheet and image.
Here are five secrets to a faster Web site by improving client performance:
- Follow the rules. Steve Souders (Google Web performance engineer) published 14 rules for speeding up Web sites with client optimizations from his work at Google and Yahoo. You can implement these by cutting code, or automatically with Aptimize’s Website Accelerator – a tool that dynamically applies client optimizations, doubling Web site speed.
- Don’t use flash or Silverlight on the home page. Yes they look cool, but those nifty flash controls take a long time to download from around the world. People spend more time watching them download than using them.
- Limit external content. Each YouTube video, advertisement and image your Web page displays from another site takes exponentially longer for browsers to download – since they have to open a new connection to the external site, and now you’re dependent on their performance.
- Host close to your market. Because Web pages load quicker over shorter distances, choose a hosting location close to your target market. Companies such as Rackspace make this simpler with data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia.
- Measure. My favorite tool for measuring site performance at the moment is Application Performance’s WebTuna. This tool continually measures the load times for every user of your site, and compares the load times against your targets. The Application Performance team recently shared with me their future plans, and this tool is shaping up to be an essential measurement tool for every Web application and intranet.
What’s next with performance?
The biggest focus for the future of performance is devices. How do we create Web sites that load fast on a Blackberry or iPhone, as well as a desktop browser, without having to create totally new Web sites for each device? Smartphones typically operate on a slower connection with higher latency, and usually have slower processing than a desktop or laptop, so this creates a huge challenge for those of us in the performance industry.
Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize Ltd. A company dedicated to improving Web performance. You can find more about him on Aptimize’s blog and by following him on Twitter: @aptimize.
