Now that we’ve seen that it’s perception that defines how your users grade the speed of your webpages (although I’m not going to argue that spending a good deal of time speeding things up in an absolute sense will not go amiss), and how to analyze the network traffic that goes into displaying your pages (one, two), it’s time to look for solutions to the performance issues we saw. […]
READ MOREIn the previous episode of this series I discussed why you might want to speed up your web pages and how it is more about perceived performance, rather than absolute performance. However, this optimization, as with anything, comes with a cost. If you have a site that receives occasional use, then maybe you don't want to overdo the time and effort that these performance optimizations might entail. Or maybe what I'll be describing may not go far enough: in which case, I hope the analysis side of things helps you more. […]
READ MORERecently, I had occasion to want to read an article on <a well-known development company>’s developer blog. It took, believe it or not, over 17 seconds to load and display on my wired connection, around 10 seconds longer than I would have waited if I hadn’t have wanted to read the content. Apparently on a phone it took over 60 seconds to load. I ran it under Firebug because I just didn’t believe it and wanted to see what would take so long. This is the tweet I sent: […]
READ MOREAs anyone who’s ever written an HTML document would surely know, everything apart from the initial DOCTYPE declaration appears in between <html> and </html>. Putting it in XML terms, an HTML document consists of one element, the HTML element. And, as it happens, it has two elements within it: the head and the body. End of story? Well, no; otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. […]