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.

Iframes facilitate the insertion of HTML document in the parent document. The effective use of iframes increases the loading efficiency of websites. The application of iframes allows downloading scripts in parallel, makes sure security sandbox and helps with third-party components like ads and badgets. However, using iframes is not free of downsides. Minimizing the number of iframes is a boost to the loading of pages one by one.

A 404 Not Found is a useless response that at times results from making excess HTTP requests. It is not only unnecessary but also the bane of website performance. Though 404s are sometimes user-friendly, they waste server resources. A 404 results also from a wrong link to an external JavaScript. It blocks parallel downloads and the browser may take time to parse the 404 response. No 404s means no delay in downloading of pages.

There are several reasons like personalization and authentication for the use of HTTP cookies. HTTP headers between web browsers and servers exchange and store information about cookies.  Keeping the size of cookies to a minimum is important to improve the response time of users. Make sure eliminating unnecessary cookies or setting them at the proper domain level. Set an appropriate expire date to remove cookies from time to time.

Web servers do not respond to the requests that browsers send with cookies for static components. It is must to make sure that your browser makes cookie-free requests for static components. Create a sub-domain to host all static components there. If www.example.org is your domain, use static.example.org to host static components. For instance, YouTube uses ytimg.com, Yahoo uses yimg.com and Amazon uses images-amazon.com. Using a cookie-free domain to host static components stimulates the functional capacity of websites.

Pages are sometimes less responsive to the requests of browsers for servers due to more than a requisite number of event handlers that remain attached to various elements of the DOM tree. That is why it is a good option to use event delegation. Use only one event handler for ten buttons inside a div and avoid using one handler for each of the buttons. The onload event does not keep you waiting to use the DOM tree in order to do something. What you need most is an accessible element in the tree. Consider using DOMContentLoaded instead of onload. Make sure reducing the number of event handlers and developing smart event handlers for a pickup in website performance.

Etags are unique to a particular server only when they are constructed using typical attributes. If the Etag on the original server and the Etag on a different server do not match, users do not receive the 304 response. Rather, they get a 200 response with the data for webpage component. It is not a serious problem, if your site is hosted on one server. If the website is hosted on multiple servers, your users will experience slower pages. Webpage components on websites with a higher load are not efficiently cacheable. Removing Etags is better to decrease the size of the HTTP headers in both requests and responses.

One of the much-practiced tactics to bolster the performance of websites is making Ajax cacheable. Providing instant feedback to users is one of the utilities of Ajax. It sends request for information from the backend web server. Using Ajax does not mean that users are not required to wait for the return of JavaScript and XML responses. If users are kept waiting depends on the use of Ajax in many applications. Optimizing the Ajax responses makes them cacheable. Gzipping components, reducing DNS lookups, minifying JavaScript, avoiding redirects and configuring Etags are the recommended techniques to boost the performance of Ajax.

A request from users for a page takes the backend server from 200 to 500ms to stitch the HTML page. While waiting for the data, the browser remains idle. One of the common functions in PHP is flush that enables the browser to fetch components by sending the partially ready HTML response to the browser. The place next to the HEAD of pages is the right to place flush because it is easier to produce the HTML for the HEAD. It also allows inclusion of JavaScript and CSS files for the browser.

JavaScript is ideal to boost the user experience. But without JavaScript, you can ensure the initial rendering of pages. Adding to the user experience is the use of post-load scripts that make it possible to have such options as drag and drop. Much opposite to post-load scripts, preload components are cacheable in the browser. When the browser is at rest, you can request for the components of next page by means of preloading components. When the user makes visit to the next page, the page will load faster than before. Preloading is of several types – unconditional preload, conditional preload and anticipated preload.

The plate is heaped with tips on speeding up website performance. So, be patience to wait for my next blog….

Using one-time expressions is a means to cut down the number of evaluations of CSS expressions. The first time evaluation of the expression sets an explicit value to the style property. The CSS expression is replaced by the style property. Using event handlers is an alternative approach to set the style property dynamically and keep the performance of websites intact.

Using external files produces fast-loading pages as Javacript and CSS files are cacheable to the browsers. Using Javascript and CSS files if inlined in HTML documents reduces HTTP requests in number. Increase in the size of the HTML document is the only downside of this option. Frequency of using Javascript and CSS components in external files in keeping with the number of HTML documents is the key factor to ensure multiple views of pages at ease. Cacheable external files offer greater potentiality to boost website performance.

Besides deploying the JavaScript and CSS components in external files, inlining them in the front page of websites is another technique to keep the volume of HTTP request in check. Once the front page has loaded, subsequent pages in the browser’s cache will load faster. It improves the response times for end-users.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It records hostnames relating to IP addresses much the same way as phonebooks keep record of people’s names relating to their phone numbers. On typing a site’s URL in your browser, a DNS resolver returns the IP address of that server. It takes DNS 20-120 milliseconds to search for the IP address of a given hostname. Only on completion of the DNS lookup, the browser can download something from the hostname.

Cacheable DNS lookups account for better performance of websites. The operating system’s DNS cache keeps the DNS information. Most browsers have caches of their own in distinction with that of operating systems. As long as the DNS information is in the browser’s cache, it does not trouble the operating system for the record. When there is no DNS information in the cache of both the browser and the operating system, the number of DNS lookups equals that of hostnames in the URL, script files, images, stylesheets and flash components of the webpage. The number of DNS lookups decreases with a decrease in the number of hostnames ensuring the fast loading of pages. It reduces the number of HTTP requests and improves the response time of servers as well.

I will share with you some more tips on how to boost website performance in my next blog…

Using a far future Expires header involves a few downsides. Having no impact on the number of HTTP requests, it affects page views when a user makes his first visit to a website. In such cases, performance improvement of a website depends on how many times users hit the web pages of the site. A component’s filename is to be changed on using a far future Expires header.

Bandwidth speed and internet service provider of an end-user are not within the control of a development team. However, other variables are there to reduce the response times of web servers by reducing the number of HTTP requests. One of them is compression. Web clients use the Accept-Encoding header to show support for compression of HTTP requests and responses. A web server compresses the HTTP response on seeing this header in the request.

Gzip is an effective and efficient compression method. Deflate another compression format is less effective than Gzip. Gzipping reduces the volume of HTTP response by approximately 70%. About 90% of internet traffic uses browsers that support gzip. For servers, what to gzip depends on file type. Many websites gzip HTML documents. Gzipping scripts and stylesheets is also useful. Gzipping PDF and image files rather increases file size. You can compress any other file format like JSON and XML.

Putting stylesheets at the top of documents is a measure to boost the loading efficiency of websites. It is helpful for users with slower internet connections. Users want their browsers to display web pages with lots of content as soon as possible. Progress indicators like HTML page to give users visual feedback have well been researched. It improves overall experience of users. Placing stylesheets at the bottom of the document prevents progressive rendering of web pages in many browsers. As a result, the user views a blank white page. The HTML specification requires stylesheets to be placed at the peak of the page.

According to the HTTP specification, no browsers download more than two components at the same time. Scripts cause problem by blocking parallel downloads. A browser does not support any other downloads during the downloading of a script. Therefore, keeping scripts at the bottom of document is a boost to the loading capacity of websites. In some cases, moving scripts to the bottom is not easy. Scripts use document.write that makes it difficult to move to the lower portion of the page. Using deferred scripts is an alternative solution to the problem. The Defer attribute tells the browsers that the scripts do not contain document.write. It ensures loading of web pages faster and hassle-free performance of websites.

I will turn up with the third blog on this crucial issue – speeding up the performance of websites….

Name is the key to identity. Images with relevant names are not only crawlable but also indexable by search engine spiders. Most digital cameras name images in numbers like IMG387370.jpg that is understandable by computers. But internet surfers are not a computer. People use words not figures as search keys to look for pictures. The names of your pictures must be descriptive of what the essence of the pictures is. If a picture name combines two, three or more phrases, using hyphens or dashes to link the phrases is a good SEO practice.

Alt tags are as important as titles when it comes to search engine optimization. Titles are reflective of verbal content. Similarly, alt tags should be descriptive of visual content. Pictures optimized with relevant alt attributes are more search engine friendly than non-optimized pictures. Pepper the alt attributes with keywords relating to your pictures. It makes searching for the pictures easier and faster than before in various browsers.

Shrinking your pictures down is better for the use of the pictures on the web. It provides a better and faster user-friendly feel saving a lot of bandwidth. Resize your images and optimize them with alt tags as well as descriptive titles. This SEO strategy is a promising traffic-generating tactic for website promotion.

The internet provides several platforms to let your pictures go global. Photo-sharing sites like Flicker, MyPhotoAlbum, ImageShack, JAlbum, and Pbase are reliable online platforms to get your pictures known among large numbers of image-loving people. Upload your pictures to these sites and link them to your own site. It will drive tons of traffic to your site.

Make use of your expertise in photography and promote your website by optimizing pictures as well as uploading them to photo-sharing sites for the use of common mass.

People’s negligence to advertising on T.V. or website is a major curb on internet advertising. Advertising one of SEO strategies is a great resource of traffic for websites that in turn, get the sites ranked highly in search engine result pages. Indifference to online advertising has led to the use of other methods to get wide notice for websites. Another limitation to internet advertising relates to improper search engine optimization of a website. Keyword-based content of websites is one of the principles that search engine crawlers work on to respond to the request of searchers. Link advertisements for your website should be optimized with specific keywords to overcome this check on internet marketing.

Hosting links on your website is a technique of internet marketing and online advertising. Link marketing is highly useful for website promotion in search engines. Consider the quality of links more heavily than the volume of links. Most of websites link your site to them in exchange of links from you. When you start giving links back to those sites your own site becomes messy. The cluttered look of your website poses limitation to internet marketing.

Online advertising if conceptualized and materialized properly, is competent enough to draw traffic for your website. Overall website architecture should be user-friendly to keep the traffic hooked to the website. User-friendly interface, navigation and design that are prominent features of a website are best bet for visitors. To keep visitors returning, your website should be easy to navigate, have sophisticated but simple design and organized interface. Lack of creativity is a restraint with internet marketing. Only creative and inventive marketing strategies can grab the attention of visitors.

Considering and improving these facts can help you do away with the limitations to internet marketing for successful website promotion.