Making Webpages Faster, Reducing Response Time
For last two weeks I have been working on converting Scriptaculous based UI elements to YUI based elements for one of the websites. This is a fun process and I learned a lot about YUI. While doing this I was also working on improving the site performance in terms of response time by making changes to the site frontend.
For improving the web performance of the site, I was following the research done by Y!’s Exceptional Performance Team. I am still working on this process. This is the first time I actually worked on CSS Sprites. I knew this technique but never got a chance to use it. I reduced the number of background images from 19 to 8, which means, 11 less http requests when page loads. Reducing number of http requests helps a lot in improving site performance. Y! has also created an amazing tool called YSlow, which can be used as Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug to measure site’s performance.
If you want to learn more about this, here is the interesting video on High Performance Websites: