Website Optimization

Website speed is important. How can you go about doing that? Andrew King's book Website Optimization is a useful guide to improving the performance of websites, both technically and in reach.

This page reviews the book Website Optimization by Andrew King.

Book review

Here I review the book Website Optimization. I offer both summaries and my own insight into some of the techniques and resources mentioned. First, although there is a "synergy" between SEO and technical page performance, I feel the speed optimization part of this book is much more useful.

SEO target

Search engine marketing is industry-specific in my observation. The book's case studies of SEO are interesting and offered me some insight into other fields of sites. Using Lynx is an excellent exercise for seeing pages how a computer does. Perhaps the most useful part is an example of what not to do.

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Google dropped the page. Andrew King's experiment showed that Google abandoned his page when he changed the title tag to the one shown. This made me question whether some of my own pages and sites might have titles that have "keyword stuffing." The title in question is not completely ridiculous, but is "stuffed."

Performance optimization

The part of the book that deals with performance optimization is the more useful of the two. Particularly interesting to me were the studies by Amazon and Google (and others) cited where a clear correlation between speed and money earned was found.

CSS optimization

Andrew's book emphasizes CSS optimization and this is worthwhile. These days browsers must have stylesheets to render any part of most web pages. I think that for most pages, a small inline stylesheet can greatly speed things up.

Are universal selectors slow? My intuition and what I know about web browsers is that the performance hit for the universal selector * is minuscule when compared with a 600 KB JavaScript such as the one GMail loads.

Comments are wasteful. The book is correct about HTML and other comments being a complete waste. Please put your comments in PHP or ASP.NET format. The only time you can leave comments is for debugging info.

Focus your optimizations

One useful tip that is not explicitly stated but useful is to focus your optimization efforts on the "boilerplate" code that is shared among many pages. There your optimization will have the broadest reach. The book is particularly effective on showing the process of optimizing pages, which can help with global site optimizations.

Tools worthy of mentioning

The book doesn't mention a couple tools that I have found effective in optimizing sites. For one, I use a combination of PNGOUT and OPTIPNG. These two exes shave several kilobytes off of every image.

CSS minification tool. After logically reducing your CSS, it is useful to run it through a minifier. Although YUI Compressor does CSS, I have found CSS Tidy to be much better in its results. The difference is small, but as Andrew states, every byte matters, and it is worthwhile to use the best tools.

Benchmark sites

The book's section on benchmarking your web site is useful. After reading it I used AOL Pagetest, which didn't help me with immediate results but gave me some insight into how Internet Explorer downloads web pages.

Another benchmarking tool. One tool that I find useful and entirely free to use is Google Webmaster Tools, which gives a "time spent per page" in its crawl stats. This can help you keep your site download times sane, but doesn't provide super detailed results.

Summary

The book makes a case for its relevance and provides proof that website optimization can greatly expand the reach of sites and people's satisfaction with them. It contains many interesting details and technically sound tips for effective code optimization. It can likely improve 99% of sites out there. This translates into more money and reach.