High Performance Design Insights:
- Use Firefox add-ons Page Speed and YSlow to help you optimize the performance of your website. Adding web analytics tracking codes, HTML event handlers, an internal site search widget and online site survey can add unwanted delay to your website's load time. Page Speed and YSlow provide the analysis and tools you need to improve your site's performance.
Note: Scrutinize the Specify image dimensions section of the Page Speed report when you use an elastic layout. Page Speed misses the image width declaration in the CSS.
View a Page Speed Report.
Download a YSlow Report.
- Do the easier website optimizations first: minify your HTML and CSS, compress your images, enable gzip compression and browser caching.
Minify HTML and CSS
Minifying your HTML source code and cascading style sheets removes extra spaces, line feeds and comments. Be sure you retain any copyright, licensing or attribution information in minified files. Use the View Source (IE) or View Page Source (FF) web browser command to view a minified CSS file, further optimized by removing unused style rules.Compress Images
Lossless image compression is like a free lunch, because it does not affect the quality of your images. Compress your images when you create them, or use the lossless image compression tools that accompany both Page Speed and YSlow.Enable gzip Compression and Browser Caching
Apache Web Server users will want to edit their htaccess file to enable gzip compression ( deflate_module ) and browser caching ( expires_module ), for dramatic improvements in website performance. Our website hosting service does not support browser caching on a shared, Linux server. As a result, we use the <IfModule> directive to demonstrate conditional support.
Download an htaccess snippet.
High Performance Design Resources:
