Good technical parameters worst load time.

[sesertin]

I have recently created a page and added expires headers, nonconfigured e-tags and gzip to htaccess code and just after that according to pingdom tools my page load time has doupled although my yslow ponts went from 78 to 92. I always get a lite bit lost with this technical issue. I mean obviously a site should not produce worse results with adding these parameters and this increase in page load time should rather be due to bandwith usage. I suppose I should leave this stuff in the htacces. Than what is an accurate way to know if you have done a real improvement to your site or your load time has really went up?

This question is more up to date with css sprites as I always read that sometimes spriting every picture is a waste of resources. How can you decide when to stop?

[shebinhassan]

Can you share the load time that you got before and after working on those technical parameters? In our website, we usually use the webmaster tools and at the same time compare it to our competitor. For example we are in the hotel business so we try to compare our site performance to the biggest hotel chains.

But then in my opinion once you worked on those technical parameters, there are still other aspect of your  site that you need to check to increase the load performance.

1. Check the size of your page. Initially, our site loads around 10 secs and this is because of our layout and we use a lot of images. First step is we compress all our jpgs without degrading the quality of it. The second part is a reconstruct the layout or our scripts to reduce the DOM elements in our site. I notice a difference on the load time when our DOM elements is less than 1000

2. For sprite images. It will be better to create a sprite image upon development instead of spriting them on the fly which is why I think they said that it is a waste of resources. I use this site for spriting our images. http://spritegen.website-performance.org/

3. You need to minify and combined all your css and javascript.

I also follow all those rules in YSLOW and Page Speed and I can see a significant improvement in our page load time. Without using a CDN our site now loads around 4-5 secs and with CDN, I think around 3-4 secs.

[AlanMosley]

It takes time to compress and decompress a page, for a litwieght page compression can actualy take longer.

If you have a heavy page then compression can be a good thing, but if your page is light then it can work against you.

On a windows server you can tell it how big a file has to be before it is compressed, The default is 256b. Thats should tell you somthing

You can also cache the compressed your static files so that compression is not needed the next time.

[sesertin]

I think this should be the case, my page is a basic html at around 200kb. Thanks for the answer.

[sesertin]

MY page is a basic html page. I have already rewrited code, there are a handful of dom elemnts, css files sprited etc. PAge load time went from 230 milisec to 500 when I implemented the new features.