Last Monday, Ed Robinson CEO of Aptimize (http://www.aptimize.com) talked at our .NET user group meeting in Redmond, about optimizing web sites. He pointed out one of the tools they use, http://www.webpagetest.org It is very interesting to run this on your site to see how it will perform.
It lists every item that is downloaded, every file, how long it takes to download, how long the server response is etc. It gives you a really good idea how long a website takes to load from various parts of the world as they route the signal through various servers, for example in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand etc. Four things that Ed suggested to make pages faster to load:
- Minify css and javascript files and anything else that can be minified. This can drastically reduce the size of those files as it cuts out all whitespace and with js files it also reduces the length of parameters and variable names.
- Use sprites for images. This means fewer downloads, fewer roundtrip requests.
- Consolidate files that are sent to the browser, such as css and javascript. This also reduces the number of requests to the server.
- Compress anything that can be compressed. Here is an article about compression using php or .htaccess Here is an article on how to set compression on the Apache webserver.
I found an excellent writeup of website optimization that explains each of those items in more detail. Ed's talk was only 15 minutes, but by itself, was worth the 7 hour total time for the trip (including waiting an hour for the ferry after missing the last one by 2 minutes;)
We are in the process of slightly redesigning the Icetips website and the plan is to have it up by the end of June 2010 and we will definitely be looking into how to optimize it as much as we can. We all like fast websites and none of us like waiting for a web page to load! It will be an interesting experiment and I hope you will see a much quicker website by the time we are done with it:)
Arnor Baldvinsson
