Let’s make the web faster, says Google. Best practices for speeding up your website, says Yahoo. Search engines want to crawl the web faster, and website owners want their users to have a good navigation experience which includes fast page loading. Both Google and Yahoo say approximately the same regarding techniques for optimizing page load and rendering speed. I am not going to go through each one of them, it’s not the point. Let me just tell you my experience regarding the implementation of these rules.

1. It’s not that hard

It’s not so hard to implement these rules. Any savvy web developer should have no trouble setting up gzip compression or the page cache. If you think it’s hard, you should not be doing deployments. No more weak sauce 25th hour deployments, please!

2. You should plan it ahead

When planning for a new website or a website revamping, you should discuss and establish the performance goals with the team building it. These are the minimal list of things I think should be established beforehand:
  • Maximum total page weight for empty cache - what is the sum in bytes of all the page elements, including HTML, CSS, javascript, images, flash movies, etc?
  • Maximum total page weight for primed cache - the same as above, but when the customer is reloading a page shortly after.
  • Static files should have a very long expiration dateur
  • What should be the cache expiration time for dynamic content?
  • How many HTTP requests the browser will make for empty and primed cache?
Remember: this is a negotiation, not an imposition. The more complex your webpage design is, the more it will weight. Balance your design with webpage size, reach an agreement on these values, and write them down. YSlow (which is a tool for measuring website performance) grades webpages according to some conventions on good practices. For an even more aggressive approach, aim for a good YSlow grade!

3. you should audit it

There are many tools for building performance grades on your website pages. I use YSlow for Firebug, but there is a list of others here. Anyone can use them, and they produce quite comprehensive graphics and stats on your webpage performance. Check and recheck these stats against what was previously decided.

Back to reality

Not many companies know their homepage total weight, or their YSlow grade. Many big portals have poor grades, and can be fairly improved. Why don’t they? I think it’s because usually Marketing people lead website projects (which is good), they measure clicks, conversion rates, etc., but they lack the tools and knowledge to measure it’s performance. Website owners, please be at least as demanding on page loading and rendering speeds as you are with design and content quality. Please make the web faster.