You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression!

Best Practices for Optimizing Frontend Performance.

1. Minify Resources

Minification of resources means cleaning up your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to make them smaller and faster to load on a website. This involves getting rid of things like extra spaces, comments, and unused code.

By doing this, your website will load faster because there’s less stuff for it to fetch from the server.

You can use special tools to automatically make your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files cleaner and more efficient.

• HTML: PageSpeed Insights , HTML Minifier .
• CSS: cssmin.js , Coverage tool in Chrome Dev Tools , YUI Compressor .
• JavaScript: JSMin , Coverage tool in Chrome Dev Tools .

2. Remove Unnecessary Custom Fonts

Custom fonts have become a popular choice for adding a unique touch to websites, but they can slow down your site’s performance. This is because custom fonts are often large in size, and using web fonts like Google fonts requires additional requests to external resources, which can make your web pages load more slowly.

Here are some steps you can take to optimize font usage on your website:

1. Convert fonts to the best format: Modern formats like WOFF2 are more efficient and can reduce file size by approximately 30% compared to other formats.
2. Trim fonts by removing unnecessary characters: Many font files contain characters for multiple languages that you may never use. By removing these unused characters, you can reduce the font file size and keep only what you need for your website’s content.
3. Preload fonts that your page explicitly needs: To improve performance, load only the fonts that are required for the specific page, rather than loading all fonts site-wide.

Using a few custom fonts on your website is usually okay, but if you use too many of them, it can slow down how quickly your website appears on the screen. So, it’s important to regularly check and think about whether you really need all the custom fonts you’re using.

3. Optimize the Images

Images play a crucial role on websites because they make the content more engaging. In fact, about 93.7% of websites use images to improve user experience.

However, there’s a downside to using images: they can make websites load slowly if they’re not optimized. Fortunately, there are ways to make images load faster:

1. Use WebP or AVIF: These are new image formats that are better than older ones like JPEG and PNG. WebP is smaller than PNG by 26% and smaller than JPEG by 25–35%. AVIF is even smaller than JPEG by 50% and smaller than WebP by 20%. But be cautious, not all web browsers support them, so you may need to use them with a backup plan.
2. Use the Right Image Dimensions: To speed up your website, make sure images are the right size for different devices. More than half of web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, so having images that fit these screens well can improve loading times.
3. Other Best Practices: There are more ways to optimize images for faster loading times:

• Compress images to make their file sizes smaller.
• Consider using progressive JPEGs, which load gradually and appear faster to users.
• Serve smaller images to users with slower internet connections.
• Use HTTP/2 instead of HTTP/1.1 for improved performance.
• Explore image sets, which allow you to provide different images based on device capabilities.

By following these practices, you can make sure that images enhance your website without slowing it down.

4. Reduce the Number of Server Calls

Generally, the more times your website’s frontend asks the server for something, the longer it takes to load. This is because each request involves communication with the server before the page can be shown. To make your website load faster, there are several ways to reduce the number of requests it makes to the server:

1. Use CSS Sprites: Instead of loading many separate images, you can combine them into a single image file called a sprite. Then, you can use CSS to show the specific part of the image you need. This way, you cut down on the number of server requests. Please refer Amazon website . They have used CSS Sprites in their header section
2. Limit Third-Party Plugins: Some plugins on your website might make lots of requests to external sources. Reducing these external requests can speed up your site.
3. Fix Broken Links: Ensure that links on your site point to real files. Broken links can cause unnecessary requests and slow down loading.

Additionally, consider server-side rendering to make the initial page load faster. When the essential data is already on the first page, it makes a big difference in how fast users perceive your site’s performance.

5. Apply Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a helpful trick to make websites load faster. With lazy loading, a webpage doesn’t load everything all at once. Instead, it loads only the stuff you can see right away and saves the rest for later when you need it.

For example, think about Google images. When you first look at the page, it shows just a few pictures and puts in some pretend pictures for the ones you can’t see yet. This makes the page load quicker. When you scroll down, it brings in the real pictures.

Besides this lazy placeholder idea, there are other options like “Native Lazy Loading” and “Blurred Image Effect” that you can choose to use to speed up how your website loads.

6. Caching

When someone visits a website for the first time, their browser has to download everything like the text, pictures, and code separately. This can make the website load slowly.

The smart way to avoid this problem is to use caching. When set up correctly, browsers store these things in their memory so they don’t have to download them again the next time someone visits the same website. This makes the website load faster for repeat visitors.

There are a few other types of caching to make things even faster:

1. Cache server: When you visit a website, your request goes to a special server that’s close to you, and it stores some of the website’s data. This is often used by services like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which we’ll talk about more later.
2. Memory cache: Some data, like parts of the website’s code, can be stored in the computer’s memory so that it doesn’t have to be loaded again when you move to a different part of the website.
3. Disk cache: This is similar to memory cache, but it stores data on the computer’s hard drive, which is a kind of long-term storage that the browser can use to speed things up.

All of these caching methods help make websites load faster by saving and reusing data instead of downloading it over and over again.

7. Enable Prefetching

Resource prefetching is a clever trick to make websites load faster. It’s like telling the web browser what things it might need in the future.

Here’s how it works:

1. Link Prefetching: Imagine you know which parts of a website people are likely to visit next. Link prefetching is like telling the browser to get those parts ready in advance, so when you click, it’s already there. But this works best for things that can be saved for later, like images and code.
2. DNS Prefetching: When you click a link, your computer needs to figure out where that website is. This is called a DNS lookup. DNS prefetching is like asking the browser to do this lookup in the background while you’re looking at the current page. So when you click the link, it’s faster because it already knows where to go.

These tricks are like helping the browser predict what you’ll do next, so it can get things ready and make your web experience smoother and quicker.

8. Use a Content Delivery Network

When the user is far from the server geographically, latency increases. Moreover, request load could also impact the content serving time.

To make websites load faster, we can use something called a CDN, which stands for Content Delivery Network. This is like having copies of the website stored on many different computers in different places.

When you want to see a website, the CDN sends you to the closest computer with a copy of that website. This makes the website appear faster on your screen.

There’s also a special kind of CDN just for images. Images often make websites slower because they are big files. Image CDNs make these files smaller, so the website loads much faster. Using an image CDN can make images on a website 40% to 80% smaller , and since images are often the biggest part of a website, this can make a big difference in how fast it loads.

For a more in-depth dive into these frontend optimization techniques, you can read my full article on Medium: Read Article

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