Website Optimization

Chapter 6. Web Page Optimization

Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximize display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

Streamlining transforms your pages to display navigable content faster, and to defer or delay off-site content. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to reduce HTTP requests, convert to semantic markup to more easily style with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), optimize graphics and multimedia, and defer or delay the loading of off-site content.

To maximize web page display speed, you can employ the following 10 techniques:

• Minimize HTTP requests.

• Resize and optimize images.

• Optimize multimedia.

• Convert JavaScript behavior to CSS.

• Use server-side sniffing.

• Optimize JavaScript for execution speed and file size.

• Convert table layout to CSS layout.

• Replace inline style with CSS rules.

• Minimize initial display time.

• Load JavaScript wisely.

Using the best practices in this chapter, you’ll transform your HTML and multimedia to give your site more hurtle and less turtle. First, let’s explore some common web page problems and trends that confront web performance engineers.

Common Web Page Problems

The size and complexity of the markup that you use in your web pages determine, for the most part, their initial display speed. Pages that are large and complex, especially those with nested tables and mispositioned ...