Speed Tip: Number 4
This is probably the most important speech tip off them all as it can have the greatest effect on page load speed.
Reduce the number of files in a page.
Once the HTML of a web page is downloaded is load all the various files that are included within the page. These include the CSS, JavaScript and to any other media, such as images, Flash files, video, audio etc. You might expect that all these files would be downloaded simultaneously. Unfortunately this is not the case. For instance you are running Internet Explorer 6, you are limited to downloading only two files simultaneously (from the same domain). This means that, in a page containing four files, the last two files cannot begin to download until the first two files have completed downloading. This obviously increases the length of time the user has to wait for the page to appear.
In upcoming posts we will look at various ways to reduce the number off files within a web page.
You can now add HTML at the click of a button into the WYSIWYG editor in EzPz. This means you can now add things like Paypal buttons and YouTube videos in the editor without having to go into the code. Click the place where you want your HTML to go, click the Add HTML button, paste the code into the box, click insert. Et voila HTML directly added into the editor.
Speed Tip: Number 3
Reduce HTTP calls by combining as many files into one as possible i.e.
- Put all CSS files into one CSS file
- Put all JavaScript files into one Javascript file
- Use CSS Sprites to serve images
Speed Tip: Number 2
Put all JavaScript before the closing body tag (</body>).
Why?
Putting the JavaScript at the end of the page allows the whole document structure to load before executing any JavaScript. You do this because the browser blocks any further page loading as soon as any JavaScript is encounter. The browser only continues to load the page, once the JavaScript has been downloaded and executed.
Speed Tip: Number 1
Put all CSS files in the head of the page.
