Google Suggested Website Tweaks

Google announced a new service they are offering called Page Speed. For those interested here is the link for everything they are offering. Google has also given out a performance best practices page which lays out a bunch of speed tweaks and how you can implement a lot of what this new service offers yourself. I found a few that I implemented and I thought I would share them.

Pantz.org Site Tweaks

1. Optimize Browser Rendering
• I specified image dimensions for all my images. This keeps browser redraws and reflows down.
• I specified a character set in my servers http response headers. This helps the rendering process start faster so there is no character set guessing involved.
2. Minimize Round-Trip Times
• I replaced my CSS @import line with a <link> tag. This allows the browser to download stylesheets in parallel.
3. Minimize payload size
• I optimized my images with the Google suggested programs jpegoptim and optipng. On the banner image alone I had a 31% decrease in size. I could not see any difference in the image quality. Smaller is better.

Analyze Your Own Website

Google has made it easy for you to analyze your own web pages. Just go here and put in your site. You will get back suggestions on how to optimize your website. I only have a few suggestions left for my site and I don't think it's worth implementing them for a 1% gain on things like minify. If my site was massive I might do it, but right now I don't think its worth it. This site is very optimized at the moment. It better be as I built it for speed and compatibility. I think it excels in both.

Reddit!

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