Is your website fit for Google Chrome Canary?

Everybody knows:  Web pages should load as fast as possible.

Page code requests resources, which are loaded one by one, then being used.

Between the start of the loading and the final usage, there is a lot of waiting for the resources to be delivered over the Internet.

To get rid of the waiting, you can load resources asynchronously and in parallel to other tasks.

The asynchronous loading works great with scripts but not so well with stylesheets and you have to change the architecture of the website to synchronize the usage again.

All the complexity comes from a simple browser rule: Load, then use automatically.

The page should just be able to tell the browser at the beginning: Following resources will be used later on; just start loading them in the background and have them ready when they are requested for usage.

This would maximize performance without adding complexity.

Fortunately, you can already do this for DNS lookup, translating a human-readable web address into a numeric server address.

If you add the following example line at the beginning of a page, the lookup is done in the background:

link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://www.dhirubhai.net" />

Other than adding this link tag line, you don’t have to change anything in the code.

Finally you are now able to do the same with other resources:

Stylesheet example:

 link rel="preload" as="style" href="https://...css">

Script example:

link rel="preload" as="script" href="https://...js">

This is a "low hanging fruit" speed revolution.  It will be available in all browsers.

You can test this already in Chrome 50 Beta – “Google Chrome Canary”.

Lothar Bongartz, 1der1

PS: All 1der1 pages are already automatically delivered with this new feature.

Google PageSpeed Tools are not reflecting the new technology. If you optimize for preloading, you may get a lower score. The Google search bot is using another technology to load your website and this is the one affecting SEO.