We just finished this webpage http://marinosactiongrill.com/, as you can see its HUGE and it has a lot of graphics (almost 7M), that make it download very slow on the first time (aprox 20 to 40 secs)
Can you help me with tips to make show more fast?
I know that its better to use sprites... but i couldnt find a way to make responsive buttons and animations with sprite that is also compatible between IE and other browsers
Regards...
To begin with you might want to consider using Google Page Speed plugin - it can help you with analyzing your performance bottlenecks.
1) By scaling and optimizing images you can save up to ~500kb of your initial loading. Also you should think of using jpg compressed images instead of png format. jpg is a lossy format but can save some bandwidth compared to png-s.
2) Setting up correct server-side caching can also work wonders - instead of loading static content on every request you can just cache it after first request.
3) There also seems to be something wrong with your server-side setup - loading relatively small and static css and javascript files takes up to 2 seconds in some cases. Is your server under heavy load?
4) In modern browsers your page doesn't have to be built using just images. Instead of making two sets of images for each button you can just use custom fonts + some new fancy css in order to achive "glowing" effect for mouseover. Here is a quick demo - http://jsfiddle.net/nc6v4/, it is done using only css, no images.
some-selector {
font-family: /*Name for custom font loaded for example via google api*/
box-shadow: /*Use for blurry outlines, glowing effect etc*/
background: /*You can use for example gradients instead of using images*/
}
5) Do not host jquery in your own server - use some kind of CDN - jquery provides it's own CDN and if you are not comfortable with it, use one provided either by google or microsoft.
6) Server-side compression can save up a lot of bandwidth - in your case ~500kb of data. Instead of passing your html, java-script and css as a plain text, "gzip" it, use correct HTTP header and browser will automatically uncompress it.
7) One last but rather important technique - combine your javascript files into one big minified javascript file. The thing is, when making lots of request to server at the same time, those requests will start blocking each other. It is MUCH faster to load 1 file which has size of 20kb rather than 20 files with size of 1kb. Use same technique for css.
To sum it all up - there is no magical technique to make this site fast by using just couple of lines of code. When you set up server-side caching and combine +minify your java-script and css files you should be fine though. When extra performance is desired, consider using modern css + html techniques instead of bandwidth heavy images.
Also, as a quick side note, your page doesn't have to look 100% identical across all browsers. Modern browsers perform seamless auto-updates, keeping up with new standards and old versions of internet explorer are losing their market share at quite a satisfactory rate. Furthermore, since target audience for your page seems to be gamers, browser compatibility also shouldn't be an issue.
You need to go back and optimize your images as they are far too big given their dimensions. If you used photoshop its just a case of file > save as for web > and then finding the balance between compression artifacts and file sizes.
It could also be beneficial to use something like Pictue Fill which loads versions of images for certain resolutions making the site much quicker as you go down in screen sizes. Why bother loading massive images that just get scaled down for lower screen sizes!
Its as easy as;
<span data-picture data-alt="Image Description">
<span data-src="small.jpg"></span>
<span data-src="medium.jpg" data-media="(min-width: 400px)"></span>
<span data-src="large.jpg" data-media="(min-width: 800px)"></span>
<span data-src="extralarge.jpg" data-media="(min-width: 1000px)"></span>
This might be too much work, but it is definitely something to consider.
To improve the performance of your website you need Firebug and PageSpeed together (Firefox) or PageSpeed (Google Chrome). These tools can help you to improve also other bottlenecks that you haven't found yet.
*Online Tool
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
*Extension for Google Chrome and Firefox
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights_extensions
*Firebug
https://getfirebug.com/downloads/
To use it in Firefox, you need to install Firebug and PageSpeed at the same time.
Related
Suppose I am using a DIV element for which I can either add a background image or can replicate the same style creating a CSS3 gradient. Now, for Phonegap applications (where all the image files reside in the device itself), which option is better to go for.
I am asking this because I saw somewhere that the gradients takes some computation time where using image may create a loading time issue. But for Phonegap apps, the image load time issue may not be there. So, maybe just using the image be a better option here?
According to an article on the Webkit Wiki, images perform better:
Sometimes it's tempting to use webkit's drawing features, like -webkit-gradient, when it's not actually necessary - maintaining images and dealing with Photoshop and drawing tools can be a hassle. However, using CSS for those tasks moves that hassle from the designer's computer to the target's CPU. Gradients, shadows, and other decorations in CSS should be used only when necessary (e.g. when the shape is dynamic based on the content) - otherwise, static images are always faster. On very low-end platforms, it's even advised to use static images for some of the text if possible.
Source: https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKitGraphics#Usestaticimages
Of course, you have to balance that CPU time with the extra time it would take to load the image from the server. Also, for Internet Explorer, filters are extremely slow, especially if you have many on one page.
I am trying to load heavy ong images in website. I have tried to use photoshop -> posterize method to reduce the file size of heavy pngs followed by some online tools to reduce the png file size without major compromizing the filesize of an image.
I have als tried pre-loading images, but still they are taking a considerable amount of time to load.
Can anyone please suggest me some way to reduce the loading time of png images on website, so they that they load quick?
Many thanks in advance!
Even if you follow all/some of the the previous advice, a nice addon to your workflow is passing all your PNGs through PNGoptimizer.
It's a simple drag and drop program which strips unnecessary information out of your PNGs. Depending of the type of image, the size saving varies between 5-10% and more than 70%.
Try preloading using XHR and some server tricks.
Or use the webp format.
Your problem must be elsewhere.
At most, 79kb x 5 is less than 1/2 a MB. This would only be a slow load on a slow connection.
I suggest you install YSlow ( http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ ). It analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
There is a nice JS script to ease the preloading of images: https://github.com/jussi-kalliokoski/html5Preloader.js
Be also aware, that proper caching is a MUST for heavy sites. Google has a nice introduction for this purpose: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/caching
To avoid flashing images on your site, load low-res images with fast loading time, stretch them to the full size and replace them when the high-res images were loaded. To improve optics you could also place a grid over the low-res image.
This has a pretty neat appearance for the visitor and reduces wait time.
Depending on what server you have, I use image gen for all my .net sites.
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/imagegen
<img src="/ImageGen.ashx?image=/images/an-image.png&width=50&height=50" width="50" height="56" alt="">
Photoshop's Posterize will not help you; PNG's don't use a palette (Unless you choose PNG-8). You can use File->Export for Web to export a smaller PNG (or a gif). If your image contains alpha information, it will be lost if you export for web though. PNG-8 and PNG-24 both have index-transparency.
#ShrutiJakhete you can use lazy load Jquery with your HTML5. The images outside the view port will not be visible until you scroll down the page. Thus it'll reduce the loading time. Check this out http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
I'm using several PNG images (via CSS) into a site's template, xhtml and CSS,.
I've kept the pngs as small as possible, and optimised as possible, but when testing it in any browser (Safari, Firefox, IEs) it takes at least 2 seconds to render.
Unfortunately I can't share the code here, but I can say that I've removed all javascript and my html code is fairly small (about 250 lines and no tables) and validates correctly.
I would like to know if the PNGs are the "guilty" part as this is my first site done almost exclusively with pngs (instead of gifs + jpegs) (I won't support IE6 so no need for hacks).
No, they do not take time to render (unless you have a really slow computer). What does take time, is the retrieving of a lot of small files. When you query a web-server for a small file, the time retrieving the file itself does not take long. But to setup the connection etc. etc. adds up.
So, what you should do, is to make what is called a "sprite". Combine all the small images to one large and "cut" them with CSS. How it is done and what it is exactly is explained here:
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
and here
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/27/the-mystery-of-css-sprites-techniques-tools-and-tutorials/
If you have many images (doesn't have to be PNGs), then download times will be impacted. By default browsers have a limited number of threads to download content with (IIRC FF has 4), so the more images you have, the longer things will take.
Additionally, if you don't specify dimensions on your images, the browser can only correctly layout the page when an image arrives. It will need to reflow the layout for every such image, which is both expensive and time consuming.
In short, ensure you don't have too many images to download and that the HTML markup has the right dimensions for them.
One workaround for having many images is to use CSS sprites.
Check this link. Read under the "Optimize Images" tab.
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
Speed up Images Load Time
I hope this was the thing you needed.
I've been working on a website, and we've managed to reduce the total content for a page load from 13.7MiB's to 2.4, but the page still takes forever to load.
It's a joomla site (ick), and it has a lot of redundant DOM elements (2000+ for the home page), and make 60+ HttpRequest's per page load, counting all the css, js, and image requests. Unlike drupal, joomla won't merge them all on the fly, and they have to be kept separate or else the joomla components will go nuts.
What can I do to improve load time?
Things I've done:
Added colors to dom elements that have large images as their background so the color is loaded, then the image
Reduced excessively large images to much smaller file sizes
Reduced DOM elements to ~2000, from ~5000
Loading CSS at the start of the page, and javascript at the end
Not totally possible, joomla injects it's own javascript and css and it does it at the header, always.
Minified most javascript
Setup caching and gziping on server
Uncached size 2.4MB, cached is ~300KB, but even with so many dom elements, the page takes a good bit of time to render.
What more can I do to improve the load time?
Check out this article.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/06/page-performance-what-to-know-and-what-you-can-do/
If the link gets removed or lost the tools mentioned are:
YSlow (by Yahoo)
Google's Page speed
AOLs web page test
Smush.it (Image compression tool)
It sounds like you've done a great job of working around the real problem: those giant graphics. You can probably squeeze some more efficiency out of caching, minifying, etc., but there has to be a way to reduce the size of the images. I worked with a team of some of the pickiest designers on Earth and they never required uncompressed JPEGs. Do you mean images cut out of Photoshop and saved on full quality (10)? If so, the real solution (and I appreciate that you may not be able to accomplish this) is to have a hard conversation where you explain to the design company, "You are not your users." If the purpose of the site is to only impress other visual designers with the fidelity of your imagery, maybe it's ok. If the purpose of the site is to be a portfolio that gains your company work, they need to re-asses who their audience is and what the audience wants. Which, I'm guessing, is not 2 minute load times.
Have you enabled HTTP Compression (gzip) on your web servers? That will reduce the transfer size of all text-based files by 60-90%. And your page will load 6-10x faster.
Search StackOverflow or Google for how to enable it. (It varies per server software: Apache, IIS, etc).
Are all the DOM elements necessary? If they are, is it possible to hide them as the page loads? Essentially, you would have your important need-to-be-there dom elements render with the page, and then when the document is loaded, you could unhide the rest of the elements as necessary
$('.hidden').removeClass('hidden')
Evidently, there are plugins for compressing and combining JS/CSS files:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/site-performance
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/site-performance/7350
I would say you can't do anything. You're close to the absolute limit.
Once you get to a critical point, you'll have to compare the amount of effort you'd need to input into further compressing the site against the effort of throwing the most bandwidth expensive components out the window. For example, you might spend 20 hours further compressing your site by 1%. You might also spend 40 hours on throwing the Joomla theme away and starting again saving 50%. (though probably not).
I hope you find an easy answer. I feel your pain as I am struggling to finish a Drupal project than has been massacred by a designer who hasn't implemented his own code in years and has become institutionalized in a cubicle somewhere near a tuna salad sandwich.
I don't have much experience with the sprite approach to images (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites). Anyone care to share some pros/cons of sprites vs. old-school slices?
The main advantage of sprites is that the browser has to request less pictures from the webserver. That reduces the number of HTTP requests and makes it possible to compress the parts of the design more effectively. These two points also represent the disadvantages of sliced images.
Here you can see some good examples how sprites improve the loading speed of web pages:
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
Pros:
It's far easier on the server to serve a single large image than many small ones.
It's (slightly) faster for a web browser to load such an image.
Browsers only load images as they needs them - if you are using multiple images in a rollover, the browser would "pause" the first time you roll over the element. This can be solved using sprites, because there is only one image to load.
Cons:
It's kind of a pain to code (more so than using multiple images at least)
One often overlooked downside of using CSS sprites is memory footprint:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130605000516/http://blog.vlad1.com/2009/06/22/to-sprite-or-not-to-sprite/
Unless the sprite image is carefully constructed, you end up with
incredible amounts of wasted space. My favourite example is from WHIT
TV’s web site, where this image is used as a sprite. Note that
this is a 1299×15,000 PNG. It compresses quite well — the actual
download size is around 26K — but browsers don’t render compressed
image data. When this image is downloaded and decompressed, it will
use almost 75MB in memory (1299 * 15000 * 4).
When sprites get loaded into the browser, they are stored uncompressed. A 26 KB file can uncompress to take up a whopping 75 MB of RAM. You should be mindful of using sprites with very large dimensions.
There's also the issue of what happens in browsers with poor CSS support (legacy browsers). The sprites may end up totally broken.
Sprites
Pros:
Less HTTP connections to the server
Faster loading on broadband
Cons:
No encapsulation: If you want to change one image, you have to change the sprite
It is difficult to setup individual images in CSS without a tool
Don't degrade: If the browser don't support CSS, you are in trouble
CSS Sprites:
Pros:
Graceful degrade in unsupported browsers (text can be shown when background images for links are not allowed)
Fewer HTTP requests
Each image has a separate overhead like color table so image slicing will be having more overhead than CSS sprites
Cons:
Poses a problem if images are turned off in the browsers (rare case though)
Image slicing:
Pros:
User perceives a faster load since loaded piece by piece.
Load on demand like when the user places his mouse on the image
Cons:
The webpages might have a large size on the client side even thought it might not be the case on the server side.
The main drawback of sprites is it makes it hard to read/maintain/modify your CSS. It can be difficult to remember the exact pixel offsets within the sprite.
pros using sprites :
since it is using 1 images for all, it require less load on http server.
cons:
- hard to code. you must know the coordinate each images inside sprites so you can display it correctly. once you change the size of the image, you need to adjust all ...
- big images could creates long waited page to display. while using images, user with slow internet connection can see one by one.
best practices.
use it for example roll over images.
Look into using a CSS sprite generator (we use SmartSprites). That way you can do slices locally, and have your build process generate a spritemap. It's the best of both worlds.
Also is SmartSprites isn't for you, there's definitely others, however I like it because it reduces the amount of work up front AND during changes.
Cons
- slower on older browsers/ maybe not working on them with hover effect (opera6)
- if not used correctly can get very/too huge (group them adequately!)
- tedious work to set them up
Pros
- less bytes transfered, because one big image is smaller then all individual images combined (one header/ color table)
- less http requests
I prefer going the middle ground of grouping similar images (normal, hover, selected page, the parent page of selected page) than having all the images in one file. To make these, you image slice like normal in Photoshop or Illustrator, open the files up and combine them with a shortcut key. I wrote the Photoshop script that combines images into CSS sprites. You will have multiple HTTP connections, but won't have the load delay on hover.