Web tips for improving speed of my website?

Question

Provide some useful tips as

• How can I improve the speed of my website?
• What are the advantages & disadvantages of using sub domains?

Answer 1

Major optimization can be achieved by reducing the number of server requests. Any other optimizations will not result in big difference in performance generally. With that in mind, lets inspect your website.

An initial page load required about 36 requests. Out of this, 4 requests were for CSS and about equal number of JS files. Now If I was you, I would ask myself the following questions.

1. Are these CSS & JS files always required? If yes, can I combine them into one?
2. Can I avoid loading the unrequired CSS & JS files for initial page load? i.e. download them only when necessary and being used. (E.g. is print.css required for initial page load ?)

The rest of requests are majorly for images. So you should consider using 'sprites' to reduce the number of server requests. Read about them and learn to use it from here http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/. Again be smart in combining the images. Ask the same questions as above while deciding to combine images.

With these two steps, you should be able to reduce the number times you go to server and comeback.

Next optimization would be to reduce the size of each request. For this, consider minifying your CSS and JS files. Also compress the images without loosing quality. Have appropriate sized images i.e. if you have an image of dimensions say '778 x 475' but the image is displayed in smaller dimension of 475 x 250, then you should think of resizing the image to reduce its size.

Also be smart in identifying your audience. If you're audience are tech-savy and use modern browsers then you can reduce HTML, JS code size and some unnecessary request for images as you can achieve the same using CSS3 and HTML5.