General Web Performance Tips

Regardless of what your site does, it is a good idea to keep pages as small and simple as possible to improve performance and increase site responsiveness. Here are some quick reminders of small changes that could make a big difference on how your site performs.

• Minimize number of external embeddables, particularly Flash. Every embeddable must be downloaded and run, adding to page load. It's important to balance lots of functionality with large pages that take too long to load.
• Minimize number of additional resources that must be fetched from the server. Note that JavaScript is fetched synchronously. Images & css are fetched asynchronously but may affect user experience due to browsers opening only 2 connections to the server at any given time.
• Minimize size of page, css, images, etc.
• Reduce size of html pages. You can achieve this by:
  • removing whitespaces,
  • removing redundant tag attributes,
  • simplifying DIV nesting structure,
  • striping http://site.ning.com/index.php for relative urls
  • factoring out long 'style' attributes into a css class
• If your site uses Macromedia Flash, remember to compress your Flash movies and embeddables. For example, the Ning photos slideshow player was compressed from 136kB down to 46 kB, a saving of 1.4 seconds on a 512 kbps connection.