How to speed up your site according to Google
Ivan | Wed, 2009-06-24 21:35According to Google speed is everything. I personally agree. I can't stand slow sites. Speed is probably the second most important thing for me after content.
Here is a list of tips from Google on how you can improve your site's speed:
- CSS: Using every declaration just once
- How gzip compression works
- HTTP caching
- Improving website performance with Page Speed
- Minimizing browser reflow
- Optimizing JavaScript code
- Optimizing web graphics
- PHP performance tips
- Prefetching resources
- Properly including stylesheets and scripts
- Reducing the file size of HTML documents
- UI messaging and perceived latency
Drupal, the CMS engine behind creativebits uses many of these techniques successfully to speed up pages. It compresses the CSS files and it can pack several files into one single CSS file. It can cache pages so there are less php and mysql requests.
On Ads of the World because of the huge traffic we had to use http caching on top of Drupal's built in features as well.
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Great Informative post.
I would think that having a good host/server is a factor as well.
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Apparently a LOT of people have posted about this, stating that Google has lost their mind with some of the stuff:
http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/google-speed-tips/
I haven't read through the reddit and hackernews links yet.
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I thought they were a little simple too, but 90% of sites do not take even these tips into account, so I think it's valuable.
Regarding the php tips, I can't comment. Maybe a developer can help us out.
I think optimizing large images well is going to save more bandwidth than anything else.
That's very true, but unfortunately all CMS engines work with a single setting. It would be a great improvement if the CMS would make a distinction between a drawing or a photography and would decide on whether to use jpeg or gif as the method to compress and resave. Also, images with reds in them need higher quality setting for jpeg to make them look decent.
Drupal sites are always slow to load... I have never worked with the platform because I feel it is not flexible enough, so it could just be the particular sites I've seen, but every single Drupal site I've ever visited has been unimpressive and some of the most slow-to-load sites out there.
Regardless of Drupal's place in this, I can definitely agree with the idea that sites need to load quickly. It is a fast-paced world and people simply won't sit around waiting for your page to show up. I am sure I am not the only one who, when searching Google or some other link directory, will click back if the main content of the page doesn't show up within a few seconds.
You can have Flash sometimes, and other media that may take a bit longer to load, but the main content should always be available for people to read within 5 seconds of landing on your site.
Well, it is kind of counter intuitive to criticize a platform for "not being flexible enough", while admitting you never worked with it.
Drupal is not slow if the site is architected and optimized properly.
We do a lot of consulting in this area, and run several very high traffic Drupal sites (we are talking 600K to 1M page views a day per site).
We wrote many articles here: Drupal performance tuning and optimization for large web sites.
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Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
You are right, I don't know much about the platform. In fact when writing this comment I didn't even realize that CreativeBits itself is based on Drupal. Definitely not anything like the Drupal sites I've seen that I was basing this comment on. Shows what I know! My apologies.
Optimizing images as well as flash is key.
When using flash, always, always use preloaders so people know when content is there and on its way.
I like the 5 second rule, thats a good aim for targeted users to see the page.
There's a way to test the download speed in dreamweaver so you can play around with different download speeds to optimize to a certain connection. If you are looking for how to do it (windows) its in edit > preferences > status bar, and there you are
You can also do this method in flash to debug/test speeds when you output a test swf
::PlasticPrinters Blog I maintain:: http://plasticprinters.blogspot.com
::My Real Passion/Career:: http://www.insphyreperformance.com