Tips to Improve Site Speed

My site is kind of slow. Are there things I can do to improve the speed? I use SharePoint, maybe that's the problem, but I would appreciate any tips that might help.

Thanks.

 

Smaller images, make .gifs of them if they are not already that.

Would be easier to say if I know your site.

 

some avoiding flash frame and image can achieve

 

Try turning on HTTP compression. If you have large HTML pages it can give a good speed boost.

 

Though .gifs are often times smaller in size for images that have only a few colors, be sure not to try to make a photo a .gif. You might also want to look at .pngs as support for the format has been around for years. They are often smaller in size than .gifs and allow for better compression even of photos.

 

I heard of a technique where we program it so the site loads the content first, then the ads later. Anyone knows of this?

Thanks.

 

I've never heard of this, But I'm sure that if you put ads into divs at the bottom of everything else and then used positioning on them, then your content would show first.

Plus the use of divs over tables is another way to optimize your site. I should have mentioned that earlier.

You might also try using page or partial page caching. This will speed up your site considerably (as long as the page is constantly updated).

 

No idea whether this applies to you, but if you use MS Word as your HTML editor it'll slow down your site quite a bit since it adds a TON of useless and extraneous code.

 

Use FLUSH to flush out the output before they actually put to user. It actually helps.

 

1. Make sure to use HTTP caching - don't make the users download the same picture, JS, CSS, HTML or any other "static" file over and over again.

2. You can upload large pictures to a free picture storage site - this will save you bandwidth.

3. Make sure that the JS (or other client side code) is executed only after the HTML code has been download and displayed to the user - this will make the site more user friendly.

4. Use caching as much as you can - cache the DB query results or any other dynamic content which is changed every X min.

5. Use SSL only for the web pages which contains sensitive information

6. Use HTML compression to reduce page size but balance it to match the server processing power since the compression might be CPU consuming operation.

7. Remove any code which might affect the site's performance. for example the string concatenation (str = str & "aaa") in a loop will
make your web page very very slow.

8. Remove any unneeded code - if a portion of the page will not be displayed then make sure not to render it.

9. Reduce the access to the session and application objects as much as you can - the page will be rendered much faster if you don't call
the GetSession("X") in a loop. (cache it like point 4)

10. Use AJAX - This will reduce the load from the server (the page will not have to create and send each time) and make your site more user friendly.


Hope those tips will help

 

Thanks for your detailed input!

 

I agree with all of Adi's suggestions except #10. That is, use well written AJAX. I keep finding free AJAX snipits that could potentially put a huge additional load on the server. While it may display fewer pages, some poorly coded AJAX scripts generate 10x the DB queries per page

 

I agree that AJAX by itself will not solve the problem and might introduce some new performance issues.

That implies to each point I wrote, for example I saw once a caching solution which reduced the site's performance since it took less time to get the data from the DB ...