I’ve always been obsessed about fast websites and there is something that makes me cringe when I see a slow one, so I decided to write about it.
While I love fast websites, I’m also an architect of sorts at SoluteLabs and I have to balance out the ROI on the time spent by myself or the developers/designers on my team. So here are the top 11 things you need to do to get a really great website:
When I say compress everything, you need to take a step back and look at the different things at come up on the website:
With HTML and JS/CSS, you will have to first minify everything (there are build tools available to help you with the same). Post this, you need to enable gzip on the server (checkout this post to see on how to do it on the major servers and AWS s3, AWS CloudFront)
For Images, a traditional “gzip -9” won’t cut it, you will have to compress the image without losing out much on the appearance of the same. Head out to tinypng.com to compress your PNGs and JPGs. Also, you can process jpg or jpeg compression without losing the quality from the source of the online converter.
A request overhead is much high in comparison to the actual data transmitted for smaller files. While there are a lot of ways to reduce the number, following are the ones which will take away the bulk:
It’s always ideal to let the user start reading the content of the website before having to wait for the high resolution images/video first. The best way to achieve the same is:
You should have noticed this behaviour on medium.com too and you can see it in action on our website as well
Having SSL enabled is not just a nice-to-have functionality anymore, non-HTTPS websites are now ranked lower than the HTTP counterparts.
There are a great number of benefits to get a website SSL enabled and it’s now available for free by using services such as AWS Certificate Manager and Lets Encrypt.
Using a CDN will make your website load faster all over the globe (not just near to the server where your data is hosted).
We recommend the use of Cloudfront with S3 if you’re hosting a static website, it’s a great option for scalable websites.
It’s important to avoid round trips to the server if the content isn’t going to change anytime soon. You can leverage caching by changing settings on your web server or if you’re using S3/Cloudfront, you can add the same in the metadata section.
I will cover more tips in the next article :)
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