Like it or not, your end-users will judge your website. If, in their judgment, it is perceived to be slow, that judgment will partly determine how often they return. It will also affect their friends’ decisions insomuch as user experiences are shared. That’s why monitoring the user experienceis so important.Now on to the next step. We’ve monitored user experience and our monitors are telling us that things could be better (or couldn’t be worse). So what do we do about it? We know the transaction is slow, but how do we identify the source of the problem?We can search the Internet for suggestions, but we would quickly find way too many tips and varying opinions about their relative importance. Lack of information is not the problem here. The problem is that there is too much information with a wide variety of opinions interspersed.
Fortunately, someone is trying to help us wade through the mass of opinions. Based on research rather than opinion, Google and Yahoo have each published their own version of the best-of-the-best performance tips for web applications. Yahoo has also provided implicit rankings for their tips. Finally, both have created tools you can use to judge your own web pages. Yahoo created YSlow and Google created Page Speed. Google and Yahoo are not the only reputable sources of information out there, but they seem to have given the matter reasonable thought and have produced some usable tools. Read more…
Website Performance: Taxonomy of Tips introduced a classification scheme to help us organize the many performance tips found on the Internet. Since Yahoo’s five most highly-weighted tips fall into the journey from the server to the clientcategory, we might expect this category to offer the best improvement in web application performance. This and my next two articles will discuss tips that relate to the journey from the server to the client.It isn’t hard to find tips in this category. In fact, if we limit our search to just those tips identified as “best practices” by Google, Yahoo, Steve Souders, and Patrick Killelea, this category is well represented.Today’s article describes the one tip that Yahoo considers most important. Read more…
