Well that’s a question that has been asked so many times in the web and I my intention is not to repeat that. In my web development experience after so many web sites behind my back, there is always something that repeats in every site. And that’s the technology that support the development – the languages we use. Although they differ in some way, especially those used on the server site, or so called server scripts, which can vary between many options, but in fact almost every web project consist of one of the following things:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Flash or Silverlight
- Server side scripting language, like PHP, ASP or whatever
- Database server
I’d like to add one category more and that’s the images we use in every website to construct the desirable layout. They are extremely important when optimizing a web page, because almost always they make more than half of the traffic of a page.
In few posts I’ll write what and how can be optimized, according to my experience and according to the articles I’ve read. I won’t mention again why the optimization is important – I’ve written already some posts about that and the web is full of articles.
As I can say nowadays this is the most important topic of the web development. Almost everyone’s speaking about it and I’d like to give some references in my talks, just to make it more clear and to give you some basic points from where you can start optimizing.
Related posts:
- What should I optimize first in my web page?
- php.ini for two web servers
- Optimizing the web. Start with the images!
I use embedded images in a combined CSS file for my websites, and I really believe that load times are smaller.
The problem is that the rendering process takes more time until something appears (from the user perspective)… So, in a few cases, despite the optimization, the website seems to load slow because CSS takes a little more time to download (the first time).
My recommendation is to be careful when embedding images in CSS, too many images can raise the opposite effect.
When optimizing a web page I also recommend to try YSlow or PageSpeed.
Thanks!
Yeah, I completely agree that using PageSpeed and YSlow is a great collection of tools that can lead you through page optimization! Thanks!