E-conomic.com is now 50% faster
Here in the online world, one becomes accustomed to grabbing information as it is needed and then moving on. Finding and downloading information should be quick and effective, and we do not waste any time waiting for a web page to load.
Therefore, we have taken a closer look at e-conomic’s website performance and made some substantial adjustments. This effort has resulted in a 50% speed improvement!
Report by Google Webmaster Tools showing page load time for www.e-conomic.com.
E-conomic.com’s page load time is now down to 0.3 seconds. According to Google Webmaster Tools, this has placed e-conomic.com among the top 1% of all websites.
Can you beat that?
Here at E-conomic we are always up for a challenge, so if you are interested in comparing your own website’s performance with ours – or any other website for that matter – then try out the Webslug comparison tool and tell us the result by commenting on this post.
If you have any thoughts or questions about our recent page load speed results – or if you just wish to share your thoughts on website performance – please use the comment field below and we will gladly add to the discussion.
Happy racing!
Posted by Alexandra Amarotico
0,4 seconds?! That’s extremely good. Think my site loads in like, 1,5 seconds and I rate that as quite good.
But how did manage all this? I guess server and theme coding has something to do with it. Also good to see this is possible despite the Analytics script.
How we managed this? Glad you asked
Most of the speed improvements on e-conomic websites comes from front-end optimization. Like Yahoo found out 3 years ago, the bulk of website performance gains are usually found in the front-end.
Back-end areas like webserver tuning, database optimisations or server hardware usually matters less.
Of the 20+ areas we improved, we found these 3 gave the most bang for the buck:
Reducing the number of HTTP requests
Using image Sprites, combining CSS to one external file and combining JavaScript to as few files as possible, have reduced the number of HTTP request from around 70-80 to 12-14.
Caching
Careful control of caching of objects for images, CSS files and JS files with far Expire dates. This have resulted in only 2-3 needed HTTP requests for returning visitors.
GZIP compression
HTML, CSS and JS files are compressed with GZIP resulting in around 70% reduction of the file sizes for these types of files.
CSS optimisation
Careful optimisation of the CSS file to eliminate inefficient CSS selectors makes the browser render pages faster.
Ok that was 4, but as you can imagine it is hard to stop once you experience the performance gains.
While the 3-4 listed areas gives the best results, many other improvements adds to the reduction of page load time from 1.4 seconds to around 0.3 seconds we have achieved since the launch of the new website platform in October 2009.
About the Google Analytics script, funny you should mention that: This is now the single largest bottle neck for the perceived website performance we have.
Notice the word perceived, because the Google Analytics script actually loads in the background or late in the code, but it still gives Busy indicator in many browsers until it is loaded.
If you want to read more about website performance and optimising, these are good places to start:
Yahoo – Best practices for speeding up your website
Google – Web Performance Best Practices
That is really fast. I now Google has a tool for checking out what is needed to do with your webpage to speed it up. Also Pingdom have a tool for checking which elements on your site is taking longest time to load. Very useful.