Optimise website performance

Paul Bouwer, architect at Qualica Technologies, an international provider of network and application optimisation services, points out that with the competition just a click away, website owners - especially those concluding transactions online - must ensure that they inconvenience their customers as little as possible.

“The most effective websites are those that load quickly and are responsive to users' commands. Yet too few have been subjected to website optimisation (WSO) techniques that reduce website size, traffic and complexity and maximise website performance. In South Africa with our limited and expensive bandwidth, this is particularly important,” he adds.

Site design

In addition to ensuring the website loads faster and appears more responsive, WSO can also include search engine optimisation (so that your website features prominently among search engine results); pay-per-click optimisation (to get the best value out of the keywords you bid for when associating your website with search engine advertisements); and conversion rate optimisation (getting more traffic and sales).

Bouwer believes that all this should form part of every overall site design or redesign process. Qualica used several optimisation techniques when developing the 1time site (www.1time.aero), resulting in a site that is garnering awards for its ease of use and navigability.

“The problem is that too few developers are aware of the simple techniques that can be employed to gain huge savings in terms of bandwidth and speed. It is therefore up to website owners to ensure that vendors and internal development teams take cognisance of these techniques, since they have a direct bearing on business effectiveness.

“However, while the argument for optimisation is a no-brainer, there are a few pitfalls. Website owners should be aware of the potential for over-optimisation, or spending too much time to recover too little in terms of savings,” he says.

Optimisation techniques

1. Compression. This allows pages to be compressed before being sent to the browser. It can result in a significant 70-90% savings in content size. However, there are certain browser versions that have known compression bugs and will not display compressed content. Pages should therefore be compressed only to those browsers and versions of browsers that can handle it - it's better to have a slower site than one that does not work.

2. Resource count. As the major browsers typically only allow two connections to a website, it's important to reduce the number of items that a browser would have to request per page. A large number of requests will make the site appear slow.

3. Expires headers. This technique is used to configure web servers to tell a browser how long it should cache specific website content for before requesting it from the web server again. This can be used to force the browser to cache content and ensures that all static content on a page is fetched only once during the user's interaction with the website.

4. ETags. This is a web server configuration technique that is used to manage versioning on content that is a little too dynamic to use “expires headers” on. The browser will check the etag (version) for some content in its cache against the etag the web server reports. Only if the etags do not match, will the browser ask for the new version of the content, thus reducing unnecessary downloads of correct versions of content that the browser already has.