Yahoo’s developer team has come up with 34 best practices (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) for speeding up your web pages. Now, some of them are marginal in effect but all the tips get you thinking about how you go about the most common activities (for example, inserting images into a web page) and how they affect the page loading speed.
Download speed is something that many designers pay little heed to these days. It was an essential aspect of the web designer’s skill set up until around 5 years ago but designers now seem to believe that broadband makes it unnecessary. This isn’t the case for a number of reasons:
1) Some people can’t get/don’t have broadband
2) Broadband performance varies markedly around the country and during the day. My connection, for example, varies between 3000kbps and less than half that. So, my perception of internet performance is altered according to the time of day I use it
3) It’s not just about brute speed: one of the main factors to slow down a page is the number of HTTP requests. Minimise these to speed up the perception of your site’s speed.
4) Everything’s relative. Whilst compared with dial-up, any site viewed on broadband will seem faster, once you’re using broadband you’re then influenced by the relative speed of each site. In other words, whilst a page that took 10 seconds to download might take 2 seconds on broadband, this will seem slow compared to another page that takes 1 second. People expect responsiveness these days.
Take a look at the Yahoo list and think about how easy or hard it would be to incorporate them into your development practice/server configuration. There’s always a judgement to be made about whether the effort is worthwhile but some of these are simply a change of practice and ought to become standard practice.
Posted via email from Kevin’s posterous
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