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Posts Tagged ‘optimization’

Optimizing This Site, Part II: Use a CDN

The second recommendation yahoo makes is to use a CDN - or Content Delivery Network. The idea of a CDN is to take the uploaded files, and distribute them to servers around the world, so when a file is requested it is served from the nearest/lowest latency server. The secondary benefit is that this also offloads some of the processing power from your server, to an entire network of servers - whose whole purpose is to serve your files as quickly as possible. Since these are merely file servers and nothing more, generally only static content is suitable to be put onto a CDN - things like javascripts, stylesheets, and images. Initially, I was planning to use Amazon's Cloudfront CDN, because it is very low cost and has Amazon backing it. However, during my research I discovered that Cloud...

Optimizing This Site, Part I: Reducing HTTP requests

According to YSlow, I received an F for the number of http requests made by my homepage. This page currently has 23 http requests, including 12 javascript files and 5 css files. This is way too many, and we need to bring this number down. Here is a link to what Yahoo has to say about reducing HTTP requests. I'll list my updates in the same order.
  1. Combined Files

    It makes sense that the first thing I should do is combine those javascript and css files. I certainly don't need 17 when 2 or 3 will do just fine. So, what I'm going to do is take all of my separate javascript files, open them up, and copy and paste the code into one large file. Yes, this makes editing a little more time ...

Optimizing This Site, Prelude

As I was redesigning this site, and preparing to redirect my domain to it - I decided that I would hold off on performing the optimization that is important to every website. Instead, I thought I would create a series of posts about the process - step by step so we can all witness how the site improves which each optimization performed. I'm going to try to go in the order presented by Yahoo and their YSlow firefox plugin, in order to present actual numbers related to the changes.

Currently, the site is totally unoptimized. I haven't removed redundant or unused styles from the CSS. The javascript isn't minified, its in the header, and each plugin is a ...