Site Optimization - Common Bottlenecks

      "It's slow" - this is a phrase I've heard a lot as someone who used to do tech support. If you don't know what is slow, or what could be causing the slow down; how are you supposed to fix it? Today we will talk about some of the common bottlenecks of websites, and what can be done to optimize performance.

Where Do Bottlenecks Occur?

      It's important to know what is happening behind the scenes when a user visits a website. I'm sure most of you already know how web traffic works, but it is important to highlight so we know what we can do to optimize performance. A client PC performs a GET request to the server, and the server (hopefully) responds with an index.html file. The browser parses through the html document, and when it finds instructions to download more files; subsequent requests are made to the server until the page is completely loaded. This means we have 3 areas we can target for optimization:

• Front-End
• Network
• Back-End

      For the front-end, we can optimize our code and the critical render path. We can minimize the file size that we send over the network by leveraging compression technology. On the back-end we can use all sorts of cool technologies like CDN's, caching, load balancing and more...

What's Next?

      I'll continue this series with a deeper look into how we can actually gain better performance with our applications. We will take a look at reducing the stress on network traffic in the next article. Thanks for reading and see you next time!