Ways to increase site performance
There are many ways to increase site performance, until now i have discovered a few very good ways to make it better. In this post i will show you the ways i have discovered and explain to you how they work and exactly improve your site performance.
CSS Sprites
You heard of them by you didn’t really understand what they do? The idea of CSS Sprites is very simple, you take a lot of images on your site and stack them all together in one big image and loading the all of your images from the big one. How does this Help you to increase site performance you must be saying?
Well, When you have a lot of images your site may be loading them faster per image but in the overall time it takes more time and uses more HTTP requests and therefore it uses more bandwidth, and when it loads the one big image it uses only 1 http request for it and cache it on your computer so that every time an image has to be shown on page, it is already loaded.
I am recommending a wonderful site and a very useful tool to do the sprite job for you its called spriteme
CSS Cleaner
That’s right, there are several tools to clean up your CSS in order to make it smaller in size, and save some additional bandwidth and minor speed increase. One of the tools i have user is called cleancss. Specially when you have a long CSS file you might find it very handy indeed.
External CSS and Javascript
Always try to keep the css and javascript code in external files. As CSS and Javascript are being read by the browser once on first load and cached, and in lined styles and scripts are being rendered repeatedly.
If you are looking for additional information on more complex ways to increase site performance there is a very specific article on Yahoo developer site.
