Mass web hosting is a popular way to host web sites. Lower costs, easy site creation, and convenience lure site owners to host with the likes of HostGator, GoDaddy.com, and Yahoo.com. The problem with mass hosting is just that, a massive amounts of sites on overloaded servers. With sometimes hundreds of sites on a single web server, your site can suffer slowdowns when another site on the same server gets hammered. Often the best approach in this situation is to move to a new host with more lightly loaded servers. This article shows the effects of such a move for a client on a mass web host.
Server optimization
Use a Website Accelerator – testing automated web performance optimizer radware fastview
There are a number of automated ways to speed up your website. Web developers can deploy both software and hardware solutions to speed up their website automatically. By embedding best practices into code, vendors can speed up websites without the need to involve developer resources. This article evaluates Radware’s Fastview web acceleration hardware. Some other solutions are listed below.
Optimize Start Render Time – web page optimization of start rendering times
Start render optimization takes place before the first content appears to the user, and is critical for good HCI feedback. A fast start render time gives the user visual feedback
that the web server is responsive. Ideally you want a start render time (and useful content
display) of under 1-2 seconds (see Website Optimization Secrets for details). The start render (the time it takes for the first visible changes to appear) is composed of Time to First Byte (TTFB) connect time, server response time, processing objects in the HEAD of your document, and initial page parsing and rendering. Optimizng your start render time is a matter of optimizng each of these delay components.
Flush HTML Early and Often – flushing html to speed up start render times and page rendering
When a user requests a page, it can take from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to create the HTML. During that time the browser is idle, waiting for data to arrive. Developers can speed up start render times and the display of useful content by flushing the buffer. Flushing HTML sends a partial HTML response to the browser, which modern browsers can display. Flushing allows the browser to start fetching components and rendering the response while the backend can continue creating the rest of the HTML page.
Localize External Resources – The Perils of Off-Site Widgets
Third-party widgets abound these days on the Web. Widgets, typically implemented with a snippet of JavaScript, are an easy way to add useful functionality to your website. The problem with all these widgets is they can cause indeterminate delays if any third party servers are slow.
Blocking JavaScript with Web Page Test – simulate eliminating JavaScript on web page load times
With the proliferation of content management systems we’re seeing an increase in the use of JavaScript. WordPress, Movable Type, Joomla, Drupal all employ JavaScript to add enhanced functionality to their sites. Plugins abound promising Web 2.0 features, higher interactivity, and increased user engagement. The problem with this trend is that JavaScript usage is inceasing at an alarming clip (see Figure 1). The HTTArchive shows the average page uses 14 external JavaScript and 190K of code.
Blocking CSS with Web Page Test to Simulate Elimination of CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a powerful way to style your XHTML code. Used properly, CSS can use modular layered rules to style similar elements in the same page or across an entire website. CSS optimization is an entire field in itself, utilizing shorthand properties, colors, modular CSS techniques, and even object-oriented CSS techniques ala Nicole Sullivan. CSS files like JavaScript files, however, can be overused. This article shows how to simulate the elimination of CSS file to approximate refactoring your CSS code to be smaller and to be combined within a single file.
Diagnosing Slow Web Servers with Time to First Byte – slow server response time to first byte metric – Speed Tweak
Although 80% of web performance problems are typically due to front-end issues (Souders 2009), back-end bottlenecks can slow your site down to a crawl. One thing to watch out for is when static pages load relatively quickly, while dynamic pages load slowly. This article shows what to look for when a server slows down a web site.
Velocity 2011 Web Performance Conference
I’m back from my combined business and hiking trip out west, visiting the Velocity 2011 Web Performance Conference in Santa Clara, California. The second part of my trip was devoted to hiking and photography in the great Northwest, which we won’t review here. This year’s Velocity was bigger and better and yes, sold out again. Here are some highlights.
Page Speed Online – web-based performance tool based on Page Speed Browser Extension
Page Speed Online is a web-based version of the Page Speed plugin, that allows developers to analyze web pages without the need of downloading an extension. Page Speed Online also features a mobile page analysis, which lets developers analyze their mobile sites like they are viewed in a mobile browser, with mobile-specific optimization recommendations. This article shows the new free service in action.