Having search engine visibility is critical for website success. Search visibility is due to many ranking factors, including speed. Until recently the effects of website performance on rankings have been poorly understood. This article summarizes an empirical study of web site load times on search rankings. The study found that website crawl time and its variability correlates with search ranking position.
XHTML optimization
Case Study: PhiladelphiaOrthodontists.com Mobile Responsive Redesign
Responsive web site design is the practice of laying out your website with DIVs and CSS rules to work seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices. Responsive designs transform the same content using CSS to linearize layouts, hide features, and create mobile-friendly buttons and click-to-call features useful on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. This article shows a case study of PhiladelphiOrthodontists.com which was converted from a static HTML site to a WordPress responsive site.
Use a Website Accelerator – testing automated web performance optimizer radware fastview
There are a number of automated ways to speed up your website. Web developers can deploy both software and hardware solutions to speed up their website automatically. By embedding best practices into code, vendors can speed up websites without the need to involve developer resources. This article evaluates Radware’s Fastview web acceleration hardware. Some other solutions are listed below.
Optimize Start Render Time – web page optimization of start rendering times
Start render optimization takes place before the first content appears to the user, and is critical for good HCI feedback. A fast start render time gives the user visual feedback
that the web server is responsive. Ideally you want a start render time (and useful content
display) of under 1-2 seconds (see Website Optimization Secrets for details). The start render (the time it takes for the first visible changes to appear) is composed of Time to First Byte (TTFB) connect time, server response time, processing objects in the HEAD of your document, and initial page parsing and rendering. Optimizng your start render time is a matter of optimizng each of these delay components.
Flush HTML Early and Often – flushing html to speed up start render times and page rendering
When a user requests a page, it can take from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to create the HTML. During that time the browser is idle, waiting for data to arrive. Developers can speed up start render times and the display of useful content by flushing the buffer. Flushing HTML sends a partial HTML response to the browser, which modern browsers can display. Flushing allows the browser to start fetching components and rendering the response while the backend can continue creating the rest of the HTML page.
Localize External Resources – The Perils of Off-Site Widgets
Third-party widgets abound these days on the Web. Widgets, typically implemented with a snippet of JavaScript, are an easy way to add useful functionality to your website. The problem with all these widgets is they can cause indeterminate delays if any third party servers are slow.
Use a Web Page Optimization Tool – html optimizers and validators, speed analysis and optimization tools
Sure you can remove whitespace by hand, but why bother? A number of web page analysis and optimization tools are available that can help locate performance bottlenecks and automate whitespace and redundant code removal. But some tools don’t stop there. You can optimize your JavaScript and images and even CSS with some of these tools. While no replacement for hand-tuned CSS-based pages, webpage optimization tools can give you a good start on your web page dietary plan.
Page Speed Online – web-based performance tool based on Page Speed Browser Extension
Page Speed Online is a web-based version of the Page Speed plugin, that allows developers to analyze web pages without the need of downloading an extension. Page Speed Online also features a mobile page analysis, which lets developers analyze their mobile sites like they are viewed in a mobile browser, with mobile-specific optimization recommendations. This article shows the new free service in action.
Serving 2012 Olympic Tickets: London2012 15, CoSport 0 – olympic website performance
The race is on to get tickets to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England. Millions of people (some 2.3 to 2.7 million signed up to request tickets so far) are clamoring to attend events featuring the likes of Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, and Usain Bolt. To distribute the load in the initial ticket request phase, Olympic organizers are using a batch system to accept requests over a six week period. Even with this even-handed approach, the servers were under tremendous load in the early hours of this past Tuesday. We investigate and show how performance could be improved.
Automatically Speed Up Your Site with mod_pagespeed for Apache
mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache 2.2+ module designed to automatically speed up your site by optimizing the various components of your web pages. The module does this by rewriting page resources using filters that adhere to web performance best practices. mod_pagespeed is the server version of the client-side Firefox module that analyzes web pages using similar best practices.