we all love adding new features, adding tips and tricks from other creators, tinkering around with code and constantly improving our sites..
but
te more you add the slower it gets.. bogging down as you css and custom code gets extensive, as you add modules apps sliders high res images etc etc etc
then you get to where your sites taking 20..30 seconds to load!
its time for a tune up, so heres a few helpful suggestions.
tip. make a text file on your pc to save code you remove
step 1 go through custom code remove everything thats not esential
step 2 run some of these speed tests to try to get an idea of whats slowing your site down most http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/freebies/tools-profiling-websites-speed/
if these tests show you have far too many images reduce the number of ir]\tems shown in the activuty feed i dropped from 20 to 4
reduce the number of blogs and events shown on the main page
reduce the number of photos videos members in the members module etc
tip this maybe surprising but often the lil badge (heart) i used for my donators category took the longest to load! so i made my own lil tiny low res heart insread of using the ning supplied 1
as of now the music player is the slowest loading item on my site
next
anything u can use css for instead of an image do so
example i had a "download our toolbar" image which i removed replacing it with a simple link but styled as a button
look for any 404 errors in the loading
1 tip i used was a styled list on the left collumn of "add" content links
these had arrow background images originaqly but i gues were removed from the server so are now giving 404's so i removed then from the css
next, any image thats a transparent png will be larger then it needs to be my logo as an example so i pasted that teasparemt png content over a new fike with the same color background as my site and converted to jpg and even with a 55 quality it was 1/4 the size of the png
at this point my site was 50-60% faster..when logged in..logged out it wa 150% faster
(maybe 1 of you real techy guys can explain this now the slower objects are 4 diferent connections to www.dreadlockssite.com/main/error/js
i assume this is some error catching script? and if i reduce the page errors (would it be css?) the connection to this script would educe as well?)
the final thing i did isnt for newbies as it makes your css unreadable and alot harder to edit
i had used other css minifyers in the past that always screwe up css animations so i was happy to find this css minifyer
it compresses only by removing exess spaces and formatting (assume comments as well)
so turns the entire css into 1 single line of code with no foratting
it reduces the size by 10-15% but not only download size and speed but processing speed as well
you may want to save 2 versions 1 on the site 1 on your pc as an editable version
i9d recomend continue running the speed test tools looking for trends and identifying what elements slow your page loads most often and concider removing or optimizing them
another tip when saving images in photoshop never use save as always use save for the web to save a smaller version
question for experts
is there any way to save the css file as file.css.gz using gz compression then use the link code o call a compressed version of the css?
edit: squeezing out those last few speed tweaks
to gain the most out of your speed tweaks, disable skimlinks social feeds (the twitter feed posts rss feeds ets in ning labs) (these slow things the most)
disable ning ads on desktop
disable the badges (yes they are small files but thge wait time while downloading them really ads up!)
change the activity feed to show on main page only
comb through all scripts both inline and in custom code a d remove any that arent truly esential
disable any extentions, apps and beta features that arent used everyday and esential
reduce http requests as much as possible i cut mine to 1/3 and that reduced overall download times drasticly
its now under 1/5 of what it was
keep running the pingdom and other tools looking for trends in whats slwing your site and try finding ways to reduce it
reduce overall "payload" or data transfered as much as possible i cut mine to 1/3
got it fast enough?
keep tracking the speed looking for more opurtunities to gain just a lil more
bgut remember
on average 80% of the slowness comes from server wait times
reducing the number of objects and http requests will help alot
but i see often the 1st page request takes the longest sometimes the server has a 2 second delay before even serving the 1st byte of the html..theres not alot that can be done about that unless ning increases the number of servers and redistributes the load better
plus many calls to glam have longish wait times as well
my sites 5-10 times faster now after using all of these tweaks without losing amy truly essential functionality
Replies
great tips soaringEagle
ad "speed up your site" or something like that to the title of this discussion you'll get more views and help more people
( time for a tuneup? speed up the load time of your network )
good point
updated with more ways to increase site speed...drasticly
Oh man you are great really! i need this tip! +100000
thank you SoaringEagle!
i did too thats why i posted it haha
that helps sure but most of the download times lost to delays in waiting for eachgh image
so even a tiny image can take a long time whike waiting
plus
i found using 1 tiny imge for 4 backgrounds becaue of te way ninghandles images it counted each as a seperate image and so that takes 4 times longer to download the background
those backgrounds were tint only 500 bytes
but still really added to download times
\
its the number of objects on the site that really add up
more then the size
soaringeagle thank you very much for the tip, can you let me how i can compresses the java-script codes which we used in the "End of Page Code". i will be much appreciate if this thing will be done