Hosting and Design

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

Continue Reading »
Minimize HTTP Requests

This is a very important factor that many people tend to overlook. When you use images or tables on your pages you should always include the height and width tags. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. Here is an example of code containing those tags:

<img id=”kitty” height=”200″ width=”450″ src=”http://www.domain.com/kitty.png” alt=”cute kitty” />

When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page contemporaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.

It is a good idea to compress your CSS files. Doing so will strip the whitespace (and strip comments if you wish, you can always keep a backup on our hard drive) and reduce the overall file size. There are many tools to do this for you, one of which is CSS Compressor.