High Performance Web Sites
Book Info
| Title: High Performance Web Sites |
| Publisher: O'Reilly |
| Author: Steve Sounders |
| Owner: Jim Nanney |
| Checked Out By: Jim Nanney |
| Checkout Date: 10-15-2007 |
Review
I initially thought this book was only for people running a large website. After reading it, I found there are many things even a small website like mine could use to greatly improve speed. So many people spend so much time working on the backend speedups and forget the frontend enhancements. This book contains 14 simple easy to do steps that dramatically increase actual and perceived load times. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has a web site with more than one page.
The key points that really hit home with me are this:
- Add an Expires Header
- Make fewer HTTP Requests
- Move Javascript to the bottom
- Use gzip compression
Using the techniques in this book really do make a large difference. It is stated in the book 80% of the time is not downloading the HTML page (the backend performance), but rather all the HTTP requests to download the other components such as images, CSS, javascript.
There is of course the obvious things such as compressing the images to the smallest possible size, but things talked about in this book are common sense, but rarely applied.
Web Browsers cache images, CSS, and javascript files for later use, but if they do not have an expire time, the browser still has to make a connection to the server to check if the cached version is the newest available. By simply adding the Expires Header, no request is made, so the page is directly loaded from the cache.
All in all, a very well written book. I do have one complaint, and that is the obvious slamming of google by the author in many places. The author being a Yahoo! employee, I can understand the bias, but I think it went a bit overboard.
