Regardless of what type of website you have, addressing poorly optimized static assets such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images can be the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective way to improve performance. Our definition of “finished loading” shifts even more when we consider prioritizing content above-the-fold, perceived performance, progressive enhancement, and other techniques that we will discuss in the future.
If you are not familiar with the page load time metric, I recommend reading the first post in this series where we looked at ways to evaluate the performance of your website or web app.
In this post, we will look at ways to reduce page load time and make our websites faster. We can’t control our customers’ internet speeds, but we can control the efficiency of the content we provide. Many websites are slow because they require a large amount of data to be downloaded.