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Software Engineer Study Guide — How do you make your website faster?
1. Implement your own content delivery network (CDN)
A collection of global servers share a website’s static files, such as CSS or Javascript, and they deliver from the server closest to the user’s physical location. In other words, when a user clicks on a video, the file loads faster because it’s distributed from a server nearby.
2. Use adaptive images
Most of the website’s page weight is from images. Use tools such as Picturefill or Adaptive Images to save bandwidth and improve page speed. Or adopt new image formats such as WebP and JPeg XR to reduce image weight without sacrificing image quality.
3. Cache
Browser caching stores cache versions of static resources. When a user visits a page, usually the cached version displays unless it has changed from when it was last cached.
4. Evaluate your plugins
The more plugins your site has, the longer it takes to load.
5. Combine images into CSS sprites
Sprites combine all background images on a page into 1 single image, which means all images appear when the main “sprite” loads. It reduces chance of flickering images.
