TRAFFIC
CONTENT PERFORMANCE
OPTIMISATION
If you’re among the many webmasters who are upping your game on the content front, you need to be
aware how this can impact site performance. Nichola Stott of theMediaFlow guides you through some
key considerations with different content types and some working practices, to ensure those creating
content for you aren’t contributing to a site that is slowing down or alienating by device.
IF YOU’RE IN THE BUSINESS of
marketing your brand and product with
content, you’ve more than likely upped
your game in recent times. If we want to
stay ahead of the competition this means
being first, original and inventive, and
producing quality stuff that people want
to spend time with. As a consequence,
you may find that you’re employing more
writers, designers and developers, and
external agents, all with the brief to deliver
content that’s going to attract readers,
fulfil link objectives and improve your
engagement metrics.
As you accelerate these efforts, it’s a
good idea to pause every now and again
and make sure that your content isn’t
killing your performance. We’re going to
look at key considerations with different
content types and some working practices,
to ensure that those creating content for
you aren’t contributing to a site that is
slowing down or alienating by device.
Embrace HTML5 for Animation
Whilst I’m not opposed to JavaScript at
all and have seen Google indexing and
ranking more and more JavaScript content,
a lot of JavaScript is more often than not
the slowdown in the critical path between
the Dom (Document Object Model) and
CSOM (Client-side Object Model).
JavaScript can be just the ticket for
interactive elements, as you can get
instant feedback, say, from an interactive
infographic that requires user input as
opposed to sending data back and forth to
the server. However, with multiple scripts
and external resource requests this can
contribute most to latency. If you are using
it try Closure Compiler at: http://closure-
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compiler.appspot.com which re-writes your
JavaScript into a smaller form, achieving
additional compression.
Alternatively try HTML5 capabilities for
animation and