performance

Web performance or website optimization simply means the optimizing the speed of web elements (pages, images, other file formats etc.) which are downloaded or displayed on the user’s web browser. Considering the ever increasing connection speed worldwide, it is an important issue for web developers.

Here are five factors to consider when measuring your website’s performance:

• Increased website performance can reduce your costs. Most hosting facilities charge based on bandwidth and storage usage. Many performance practices will reduce your storage costs and significantly reduce your bandwidth usage.

• Site performance has a direct effect on revenues. It is well known that site performance directly affects user abandonment rates.

• Search engines like Google take site speed into account when determining search rankings.

• Mobile devices will soon outnumber desktop traffic. Every day more and more users are accessing web sites with mobile phones and tablets, and mobile devices will soon account for the majority of all web traffic. Mobile users are even more sensitive to poor page loading and will abandon the site much quicker than a desktop user. If you ignore this segment of users, you will be left behind.

There are many different platforms and frameworks available to verify website performance, but these concepts are the same across all of them, whether it’s Linux/PHP or Windows/.NET or some other framework. There are also some excellent development tools to manage site performance such as Firebug, Chrome, etc. Fire Bug development tool with the Google Page Speed Plugin is a very useful tool in this process. It will allow you to see every resource that is downloaded and will quickly identify 404 and JavaScript errors. You can view the headers to see if the resources are compressed and see how long it takes to download each one. Your target goal should be 3 seconds or less for page load time, before you turn on browser caching.

You may also check website performance at Webpagetest or Tools.pingdom.