Page Speed Optimization

Key Page Speed Factors

Image Optimization. Reducing the size of image files has been a good practice since the early days of the web. Make sure your images are sufficiently compressed, and be sure to specify image dimensions in your HTML code. Without those dimensions, a web browser needs to work harder to render a page.

CSS and JavaScript references.Web pages have evolved from being simple HTML documents to having a range of embedded resources like cascading style-sheet information, scripts, third-party applications, and more. You don’t need to be obsessed with optimizing all these resources, but if you can set them up efficiently, your page speed should improve.Consolidating the number of external JavaScript and CSS files is generally a good thing. When practical, it is better to force a browser to load fewer files. The Page Speed tool will recommend reducing the number of external CSS and JavaScript files that have very small bits of code. You can either consolidate these files or move some of the styling information directly into your HTML files.

Minify HTML and CSS. “Minification” refers to reducing all the extra space and unnecessary characters in your source files. All those blank lines you have added to your HTML — as well as superfluous comments and other extraneous characters — can add up. If you are using a templating system to build your sites, a few tweaks to your templates can produce positive results.

Browser caching. Your web server software can send information to web browsers to help them cache information and operate more efficiently. For most web server platforms, like Apache, you can adjust the “Expires” or “Cache-Control” header attributes for the resources you are sending. You might need to consult with your hosting or ecommerce provider to make these kinds of adjustments.