Website performance why should you care?

There's a lot more to website performance than you'd think:

• How many HTTP requests?
• How optimised are the graphics?
• Is JavaScript adding unnecessary bulk?

The thing is... few website visitors will care about the technical stuff, like how optimised your killer graphics are or how mean slick your JavaScript is, one of the few things they care about is how quickly they can get the information they desire and waiting a long time for a website to load can be fatal. Few people will wait, there are dozens of websites out there, if your website is slow to load you'll quickly lose your audience!

Good Performance

Good website performance by definition should be transparent to the visitor but can make the difference between a website that's a success or one that's a complete flop.

I use a number of website performance tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and Google's PageSpeed during the creation of my websites to ensure I can shave those vital few seconds and even milliseconds off website loading times thus enable a better user experience. I also follow Yahoo!'s performance best practices which allows me to test that the changes I make actually improve performance and give me a better understanding about what actually happens when a website loads into the browser.

For more information on some of the tools I use phpied.com has produced and excellent round up of performance tools with detailed information on each one. If you're interested in website performance I would recommend giving it a read.

If you have any tips/comments on website optimisation and performance or if there is a tool you use that's not in this round up, please feel free to drop me a line.