This document provides tips on how to intentionally make a website slow for testing purposes. It discusses things that naturally slow down websites like having many page resources, large files, poorly optimized servers and caching issues. It also suggests unnecessary tactics like redirecting pages, adding random delays, overusing plugins and not testing site speed. The document aims to demonstrate factors that impact performance so these issues can then be addressed to make websites faster.

1. An Experts Guide
to making a website slow!!!
April 27th, 2012
Yottaa Inc.
http://www.yottaa.com

2. Agenda
• The Web… Its complicated
• Things that make a website slow
• Human factors of web performance
• How can you make your website faster?
• Tweet
– @rockstarapps
– @yottaa
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3. THE WEB… ITS
COMPLICATED
© 2011 Yottaa Inc. All Rights Reserved. 3

4. In between your visitors and you
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5. THINGS THAT MAKE YOUR
WEBSITE SLOW
© 2011 Yottaa Inc. All Rights Reserved. 5

6. Lots of Requests
• Product owners want rich websites
– Rich in User Experience
– Rich in Visual Presentation
• Achieving richness requires more
resources to be downloaded to the client
– CSS
– HTML
– JavaScript
– Images
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7. Fat Resources
• Many of the resources that you need to
load can be made fatter than required
– HTML, CSS, JavaScript – Add lots of
comments and white space
– Images
• Use images that are larger than displayed on the
webpage
• Always use the highest quality settings
• Turn off gzip compression on your server
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8. Bad Servers
• There are many things that can make your
servers slow
– Poorly written code
– Bad database design
– Sharing a server with others
– Old Servers
– Not enough memory
– Slow hard drives
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9. Randomness
• This is one of the hard things to add your
site to make it slow.
– Some of your users will experience a slow
website
• It only takes one resource to slow down
your website.
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10. Do not use caching
• The web allows you to specify which
resources the browser will cache on the
visitor’s machine
• Not specifying cache control correctly
means the browser will need to load
resources for every page and
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11. 3rd Party Plugins
• Bloggers love to make their websites slow
using plugins.
– Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn
– Photo plugins…
• Not utilizing asynchronous loading of 3rd
party resources.
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12. Other things you can do
• Redirect from www to non-www using client-side
– Use a 301 redirection instead of 302
• 404s – usually take longer
• Run JavaScript code while your page is loading.
• Only look at how fast your site is from your desktop
• Think your website is fast enough
• Do not test your websites performance
• Think your developers would never do any of these
things
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13. HUMAN FACTORS
© 2011 Yottaa Inc. All Rights Reserved. 13

14. Human Factors
• Desire for Social
• Desire to increase functionality
• Lack of understanding about the impact of performance
on the business
• Lack of understanding about what makes a website slow
or fast
• Lack of the ability to determine if there is a problem
• Lack of time to test and fix issues
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15. HOW CAN YOU MAKE YOUR
WEBSITE FASTER?
© 2011 Yottaa Inc. All Rights Reserved. 15

16. Yottaa
Bob (Buffone)
CTO/Co-founder
www.yottaa.com
Come and check us out in the vendor area!!!
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME
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