Although my server issues seem to have gone away, my page loading times could still be improved. The times tend to go up and down as I add and remove new features, but at the moment I think they are on the slow side.
Daniel, who has just become a full-time blogger, has put together a great post (Update: It’s now on Digg) which gives 6 Ways To Speed Up Your Site. I’ll definitely be saving this post ‘To-Do’ folder, when I have a spare hour to work on the site. The six tips are:
- Optimize Images: always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an online image optimizer.
- Image Formats: apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images. The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.
- Optmize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.
- Use a Slash on Your Links: when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the load time of the site.
- Use the Height and Width Tags: many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes. Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole process.
- Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.
