Optimize your site: Make it faster

I remember the early dial-up days of the web. I used to carefully study each product picture in a file-size optimizer program. Did the 16K image look good enough compared to the 18 or 24K image?

Broadband effectively killed such attention to file size and page load speeds.

But Google and Yahoo have brought back the issue of speed. They have introduced code analyzers Page Speed and Yslow. Yslow has been around a while, but Google’s strategic discussion about why we webmasters need to revisit speed optimization.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWWBnJEsUtU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

The faster the site, the better the experience, the happier the visitor. And a happier overall internet experience for everyone. Makes sense.

So I asked my developer, Mike Boyink, to take a look at our website. He took about three hours to make some recommended tweaks. (Not all noticably helped.) Here are the results:

Before:
3.12 secs after clearing local cache before doing anything
2.758 seconds reloading cached locally

After
2.16 seconds after clearing local cache
1.118 seconds after tweaking server side caching

So a second, or a second-and-half were shaved off the load times. Doesn’t sound like a big deal.

But seeing my pages now is impressive … because the page loads differently, it seems to pop into view almost immediately.

While the visitor may not notice the speed like I do, they certainly aren’t going to be groaning ‘come on’ while they watch their browser load my pages. And you certainly don’t want your future prospect’s first experience of your brand to cause groaning.