Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.

This is my list of top 5 best practices for making web pages fast.

1. Reduce Number of Request

Most of this time with opening web page is spend on user side in downloading all the components in the page: images, Stylesheets (CSS), JavaScripts, etc. Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

2. Use a CDN and Cache for static files

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users worldwide. With long time expiration cache control the impact of performance improvement when users hit your pages with a primed cache. Another benefit of hosting static components on CDN is to keep this domain cookie-free and not transfer cookies together with the request.

3. Compress of images, Minify JavaScript and CSS

Compress as many file types as possible is an easy way to reduce page weight and accelerate the user experience. Combine your background images into a single image - CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests.

4. Order of external files on page

Stylesheets (CSS) should be above all JavaScript because we want the browser to display content as soon as possible.

5. Load additional components after page load and use preloading components

You can split loading components in two stages. At first load only what absolutely required in order to render the page initially then post-load the rest of it. This is very useful for social media buttons, advertisement and another third party files.

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