How to Boost the Performance of Your Website to Promote it in Search Engines – Seventh Part
Friday, October 16, 2009 0:37
Fixing a problem associated with semi-transparent true color PNGs in IE versions is the chief end of the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader filter. The problems that the use of this filter poses lead to the drawbacks in the performance of websites. It blocks the rendering of the page and causes freezing of the browser the time when a component is being downloaded. It multiplies the problem triggering the rate of memory consumption. The best address to the problem is to avoid using AlphaImageLoader and make the use of PNG8 instead.
Web pages with optimized images load at faster pace. Optimizing the images that are to be inserted in the pages of your website can ensure the loading efficiency of the website. Check the GIFs of the images to make sure if they use a palette size that corresponds to a number of colors. Images having four colors and a 256 color slots in the palette need to be optimized. Converting GIFs into PNGs can help you out. GIFs are neither true colors nor support variable transparency. PNGs are not only safe to use but also more useful than GIFs. Use pngcrush to optimize PNGs and jpegtran to optimize JPEGs. These optimizing tools remove unnecessary comments and useless information from the image files.
Horizontal not vertical arrangement of the images in the sprite ensures a smaller file size. A sprite with similar colors in a combination keeps the color volume and count low. A sprite with gaps between the images makes pages larger in size. That is why optimizing CSS sprites is necessary to ensure the fast-loading of pages.
The root of servers is the place where the favicon.ico that is an image stays. The browser keeps sending requests with cookies for it to the server. Evidently, it slows down the loading of websites hosted on that particular website. This image interferes with the downloading of other webpage components. The favicon.ico gets downloaded before the downloading of other components. Keep this image small and cacheable to reduce the number of HTTP requests. You can consider using Imagemagick to create small favicon.ico images.
Create web pages with components packed into a multipart document that acts like an email with several attachments. It lets the browser download many components with only one HTTP requests. Check if your browser is supportive of this document before using the technique.
Have a go at these tips and tricks, tactics and techniques to seep up the performance of your website so that the site can rank higher in search engine result pages. Don’t forget to share your experience if they are of use for your benefit.
