The Best Practice Network Guidelines | The Best Practice Network

• Best Practice » Reporting » Valuation Best Practices » Best Practices to Increase Speed and Performance of Your Business Website » Best Practices to Increase Speed and Performance of Your Business Website

Website management is a crucial best practice for every business enterprise. Potential customers visit business websites to get information about what they need. If web pages load very slowly, or fail to load, it increased the risk of losing potential clients.

The secret every online business must know is that the first thirty seconds of a visit on your web page is the key to success. Within thirty seconds, a potential customer will decide whether to leave and search for another business or stay. Therefore, you have to make sure that you web pages are not just captivating, but they work really quickly. Here are things you need to make you website efficient.

Limit HTTP

Approximately 80% of response time (by end-user) is spent on downloading content of the web page. This includes images, music, style-sheets, flash and scripts. Limiting HTTP requests is the key to making web pages work fast. Keeping the web page design simple is important. Therefore, use practices that allow use of rich designs and content without compromising speed.

Apart from this, combining files is also a helpful strategy in limiting HTTP. The best way to accomplish this is to combine all CSS data into one style-sheet. This improves response time to a great extent. Implementing the “CSS Sprites” method is the most recommended best practice for IT professionals and web developers. This means combining all background images into one, to display the image segment you want. Moreover, using image maps and inline/embedded images also help limit HTTP requests.

Content Delivery Network

Setting up multiple servers dispersed across various states is also helpful. The user’s immediacy to the web server also affects the speed at which web pages work. Best practice to achieve this is to implement geographical dispersion of content. Redesigning the content is not as helpful as building a network of servers. Once this is achieved, synchronizing the data will make user interface more effective.

Cache Control

Using a cache control header is an important best practice. There in need to ensure compliance with two rules:

• Apply “Never Expire” as the policy on expiry of headers for static components.

• Apply an appropriate cache control for headers of dynamic components.

Caches reduce the size of images and rich web content.

Use Gzip Components

Implement the use Gzip compression reduces the time taken to transfer HTTP requests across a network. Of course, the end-user’s bandwidth also plays an important role, but compliance with Gzip components reduces time taken for servers to respond to HTTP requests.

Use Stylesheet in Headers

Compliance with this best practice ensures that the page loads progressively and quickly. Even if the end user has a slow server, web content can load. It generally improves user experience without wasting time.

Use Scripts in Footers

Java script is better when it’s at the bottom of the page. Scripts often obstruct parallel downloads. This allows end users get more than one download at a time. The script loads quickly and the server can manage multiple hostnames at the same time.

These are some IT practices that increase speed and performance of websites used by businesses.

Further reading: Corporate Governance | Audit | Performance Improvement