Whiteboard Friday

Our new boy – Danny Dover presents this Whiteboard Friday. Here is a detailed run through on site speed and its increasing importance on the interwebs and how it will affect our clients. We have all read about site speed, the difference here is a simple yet detailed technical run through that I found interesting and should help you advise your clients clearly should the conversation arise...

7 ways to speed up your site:

Synopsis:
Google have implemented site speed as part of their algorithm in order to improve people’s experiences online and also to make more money on the side (a faster internet means more opportunity to show more ads, stream more movies.) behind this implementation to the algorithm they have been doing other things on the side to increase site speed.
There are 2 main ways to increase site speed, 1)make the amount of ones and zeros in files smaller and 2)making the files closer to the person requesting it.

Google has its own motivation to Increase the speed of the internet. And have been attempting to do this; not just with the algorithm update but in other ways as well:
Google have been making the following effort to increase the speed of the internet service:

• They have been trying to make ad on’s to HTTP in order to make it faster.
• Make a public DNS system in order to speed it up (the system that converts domain names into IP addresses)
• They are also making an effort to spread fibre optic cables directly from data centres to homes, bypassing ISP’s (telecoms companies shaking in their boots)
The icing on the cake was their implementation of site speed into the infamous algorithm that dominates web usage today...

Top 7 ways to speed up site
• Gzip – enable this on your site. compression that reduced the no. Of 1’s and 0’s enabling quicker transfer over the internet.(if you really want to know – it compresses the site first before it reads it – sends it to the desired location – at which point the file is decompressed to its original state and displayed in its entirety)
• Minify Javascript & CSS (not the same as mummify) – this refers to the process of removing tabs and spaces and marks in your files that are unnecessary for a computer. Again this removes the 0’s and 1’s that really aren’t necessary for computers As spaces and linebreaks are only for us humans but ad bulk to file sizes. (for example check source code on google homepage they have done this with their HTML. Please note that this is helpful Google considering how many page views they get – however minimising HTML is not recommended for anyone else – unless you are huge. Not even bing do this) Minimising Javascript & CSS is advised.
• Use a CDN – some companies can offer you servers that are located all over the world , allowing you to be closer to the person requesting the file, thereby delivering the page faster
• Optimise your images – save as different format
photos – use jpeg’s(algorithm developed for high intensity photos)
graphics – logos and navigation use png files
• Use external javascript and CSS. When your browser is downloading something from a desired URL (e.g. example.com) – it can only make a certain amount of download requests at any one time from example.com. If you locate your external files on another domain e.g. assets.example.com it can download from both at the same time – sounds quicker to me!!
• Avoid using excess redirects – they are important but every single time you use one you are increasing the amount of requests that go between you and the user.
• Use fewer files – less graphics. Do this by using CSS sprites. This method uses one big image that has all of your pictures in one file – the client only downloads the image once and the script tells them what part of the file you want to show at a certain time. Dig.com uses this.