An Expert's Guide to Making a Website Slow - Chicago Webmasters Meetup 6/5/2012
1. An Experts Guide
to making a website slow!!!
April 27th, 2012
Yottaa Inc.
http://www.yottaa.com
2. Agenda
• The Web… Its complicated
• Things that make a website slow
• Human factors of web performance
• How can you make your website faster?
• Tweet
– @rockstarapps
– @yottaa
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6. Lots of Requests
• Product owners want rich websites
– Rich in User Experience
– Rich in Visual Presentation
• Achieving richness requires more
resources to be downloaded to the client
– CSS
– HTML
– JavaScript
– Images
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7. Fat Resources
• Many of the resources that you need to
load can be made fatter than required
– HTML, CSS, JavaScript – Add lots of
comments and white space
– Images
• Use images that are larger than displayed on the
webpage
• Always use the highest quality settings
• Turn off gzip compression on your server
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8. Bad Servers
• There are many things that can make your
servers slow
– Poorly written code
– Bad database design
– Sharing a server with others
– Old Servers
– Not enough memory
– Slow hard drives
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9. Randomness
• This is one of the hard things to add your
site to make it slow.
– Some of your users will experience a slow
website
• It only takes one resource to slow down
your website.
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10. Do not use caching
• The web allows you to specify which
resources the browser will cache on the
visitor’s machine
• Not specifying cache control correctly
means the browser will need to load
resources for every page and
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11. 3rd Party Plugins
• Bloggers love to make their websites slow
using plugins.
– Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn
– Photo plugins…
• Not utilizing asynchronous loading of 3rd
party resources.
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12. Other things you can do
• Redirect from www to non-www using client-side
– Use a 301 redirection instead of 302
• 404s – usually take longer
• Run JavaScript code while your page is loading.
• Only look at how fast your site is from your desktop
• Think your website is fast enough
• Do not test your websites performance
• Think your developers would never do any of these
things
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14. Human Factors
• Desire for Social
• Desire to increase functionality
• Lack of understanding about the impact of performance
on the business
• Lack of understanding about what makes a website slow
or fast
• Lack of the ability to determine if there is a problem
• Lack of time to test and fix issues
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