Author: Nola Young
The performance of a Web site is dependent on a number of variables: the hardware, operating environment, and bandwidth of the server. Performance also depends on the client site with respect to browser versions, operating environments and connection speed. If Web pages only contained static, HTML performance wouldn’t be so much of an issue. However, the picture changes greatly with the addition of multiple pages, images, forms, custom scripts, audio, video and databases.
Today’s Web sites, and their wide range of options, can challenge even highly-skilled Web developers in terms of optimizing and keeping performance issues in check. Companies with intricate Web sites pay close attention to performance and will do extensive testing to ensure peak performance. The degree to which you should be concerned about this depends on many factors, but if you have any of the technologies listed above you might want to consider looking into this in more detail.
If you are trying to improve the performance of your Web site, there are many things that need to be done. Start off right from the planning stages. Don’t wait until the end of a project to look at performance issues.
Many people test the performance of their Web site by using a single browser to view their pages. This will certainly give a good indication of the responsiveness, but you cannot count on the fact that other visitors will have the same browser version, the same monitor or the same connection to the Internet. That is why testing on multiple browsers, on multiple operating environments, using various monitor sizes, and over various connection speeds, are the best ways to test your performance.
Nola Young is the president of KW Digital Solutions. Send your comments or questions by email or call 519-741-7641.