My quick guide to optimising your web page for performance; from one intern to another
Unfortunately this will be my last blog post because I am heading back stateside in the next week and a half. Sydney was awesome, but I'm ready to be back home again where we have cheap food and real bacon. I will definitely be cherishing the time I spent at uni as well as the time spent at Wiliam.
I chose to seek out an internship at Wiliam because I've been interested in web design since I was 12, but never got a chance to work with professionals until now. Surprisingly, I'm not at this internship because of school (I'm a photography major), I'm here because I actually like web design (am I weird or what?). I've learned so much being here (thanks Ed & Jeff!) and I'll be carrying that with me as I venture on as a web designing photographer.
For those of you who are budding web designers/developers like myself, you put a lot of thought into what goes into your site and try to execute it as seamlessly as possible. In my opinion, one of the biggest hinderances of deploying a website is a slow loading web page which can be very unattractive to your audience. Some tips for increasing your page load time include:
1. Optimise your images
- JPEGs are your best file types because they can be low in size without degrading in image quality
- Use the "Save for Web" command in Photoshop
- Refer to websites that will compress your images such as JPEG Optimizer or TinyPNG.
2. Compress your scripts and stylesheets
- If you either download or link to external scripts such as the jQuery library, opt for the minified version
- Think about compressing your CSS as well using CSS Compressor.
3. Let Google help you
- Google PageSpeed gives you a detailed analysis on what could make your page load so much faster.
