Is Your Site Utilizing Browser Caching?
The importance of optimizing your website has grown exponentially as technology enables us to accomplish our web browsing any time on our smart phones and tablets. When building a website, there will be many files encompassing the final product. These files can vary from html files, CSS stylesheets, images, videos, JavaScript files, and more. When a user visits your website, they must download all of these files to see the page as you intended it to be seen. In the past, when page load time wasn't such a big consideration, most browsing was done on a desktop. Now, with the range of devices available, it is an essential factor in the way you build your website. When a website is built properly, it can take advantage of a secret weapon that can easily help you improve both data usage and page load speed: browser caching.
Browser Caching
Using browser caching helps by storing some of the files from your website directly on the user's computer or device in their browser. When the user returns to your site, they will not need to download any of the files that have been cached in their browser. This will increase the speed at which your site will load.
Considerations
- Expiry Date: You should set an expiry for a minimum of a month when it comes to caching static resources. If your website is still in development and your site is caching files related to the appearance of the website, such as CSS files, you may want to wait to enable browser caching on those files until the site is at the point where the appearance will not be changing for a while. Otherwise, users downloading the CSS files into their browser cache may not see the updates from the stylesheet until the time specified by the expiry has passed. An alternative is to set your expiry on your CSS files as usual and then use an auto versioning process to ensure the user will get the most current stylesheets.
- Website Tests: Many templated websites and content management systems, such as WordPress, do not use browser caching by default, so if you are not sure whether your website is taking advantage of browser caching, you can run your website through tests such as Google's Pagespeed Insights or GTMetrix's Performance Test.
- Other Performance Optimization Techniques: If you find that your site is not utilizing browser caching, it is very likely that your site is not utilizing a variety of other performance optimization techniques, such as image compression, minifying of files to reduce file size, and consolidated stylesheets to reduce the number of server requests.
LyncServe prides itself in being an agency that considers site optimization a high priority when it comes to building custom websites for our clients.
