An Excerpt from http://www.sitepoint.com/avoiding-temptations-harm-website-performance/
Learnable recently published Lean Websites, by Barbara Bermes—a book that presents the latest techniques for improving web page performance. In this article, Barbara details some of the performance pitfalls that all too often catch us unawares.
Web performance matters. Studies have shown that improvements in website performance—such as page load times—can dramatically increase user engagement and profits.
However, life’s short, and time is money. As web developers, we’re paid to get the job done—by clients, bosses and colleagues who may not appreciate the importance of site performance. So the temptation is to cut corners to get the job done—to find the quickest solution, without regard for performance. In these times of rising mobile usage and search engine preference for lean websites, average page weights continue to soar. It’s not a good situation.
Temptation: the pressure to give in to a desire for easy or immediate pleasure
The consequences of giving in to temptation are often not felt until afterwards.
This article describes some of the temptations you’ve probably faced in your web development journey, and why it’s better not to give in to them.
Using Ready-made Scripts
It’s a typical scenario: you need to add something to a web page—such as a slideshow. So you google “web slideshow” and get hundreds of results. There are so many to choose from, all ready to go, and free. Why not just use one as is, save time, and get paid? Doesn’t everyone else?
We often forget to consider the performance of the scripts we choose. Is the code well written? Is it optimized? Do we need all the functionality it contains?
In Chapter 4 of Lean Websites, I examine how to differentiate between copy and paste and copy and waste.
Pretty Images and Designs
A picture is worth a thousands words; and when it comes to web performance, a picture might be worth more that a thousand lines of code in terms of page weight! Poorly optimized images are by far the the biggest cause of bloated websites.
There are some image considerations that can make a huge difference to web page performance.
Not Every Device Needs a High Resolution
There’s no need to show everybody the high resolution version of the image if not needed. Be context sensitive, considerate and respectful. Don’t fill your page with unnecessary heavy assets like images just because you don’t know what else to put there. Trust me, none of your users on their mobile device while roaming wants to download a 2MB retina image.
Images Cost Bandwidth
Images remain the biggest performance culprits. They currently take up most of the file sizes and usage on the internet, as shown in the chart below:
Bandwidth usage of various content types
The temptation web developers face, especially when working under a lot of time pressure, is to just plug in big images, without considering whether to convert them into a more efficient image dimension or format.
In my book Lean Websites, I look in depth at ways to optimize your images and other site assets to ensure that your site is as performant as possible—especially on devices connected to mobile networks.
Performance Optimization as a Part of Development
When time is money, there’s always a temptation to cut corners. One way to cut corners is to put things off and never end up doing them. Performance testing and optimizing are critical, but it’s tempting to put them off till later and then forget all about them.
Performance optimization is often not mentioned as part of the common software development life cycle at all. But as Ilya Grigorik says, “performance is a feature”, and shouldn’t be relegated to an afterthought.
Lean Websites discusses how you can automate optimization, and make it part of your deployment process, with some easy-to-use and free tools.
Continue reading at http://www.sitepoint.com/avoiding-temptations-harm-website-performance/
