Part 2. General performance best practices

Part 1 helped you understand the inner workings of web pages and the lifecycle of a web page request. This knowledge is vital to effectively improve the performance of your web pages and it will help guide you through part 2. You are about to start applying performance techniques that will improve and enhance the speed of your web pages.

In these seven chapters you will become familiar with the sample application used throughout this book. As you progress and apply the performance-enhancing techniques to the Surf Store application, you will notice a decrease in its page load times, and a reduction in the overall page weight of each page. Each technique is a building block that will make your pages lighter and load times quicker.

IIS plays a big role in this part of the book, and you begin by looking at compression and the benefits that it brings to web page performance. HTTP caching is another important best practice that you can use to leverage the caching capabilities of your user’s browser. You will learn how to apply both of these techniques using IIS and ASP.NET.

In addition, you will look at the new bundling and minification features in ASP.NET 4.5 and how you can use them to drastically reduce the weight of your JavaScript and CSS files. Both file types play an important role on the web today and understanding where and how to position them within your HTML will squeeze the best load times out of the browser. In this part, you’ll learn techniques that can be applied by using HTML5 to improve the performance of your web pages.

Images on a web page are frequently the big, ugly brother of web page performance; they are heavy and often neglected. You will learn how to use image optimization tools that will reduce the size of these images and how you can make image optimization a regular feature of your websites.

Finally, you’ll learn about Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and how you can harness the power of these geographically distributed servers to serve faster web pages to your users throughout the world.