Proper Cookie Usage

[TheJaspMan]

I was wondering if I could get some feedback on my test results? Specifically in regards to proper cookie usage.

My site is: exposedclothing.com

and test results are:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121125_1Z_9KH/

Feel free to offer feedback if you see something else I should be focusing in on or concerned more with.

Thank you in advance.

[pmeenan]

I wouldn’t worry about cookie usage - the impact of that would hardly be measurable. Looking at the waterfall, a couple of things jump out:

1 - The IE conditional comment after the carousel is causing IE to block ( Conditional comments block downloads / Stoyan's phpied.com ) - putting a simple empty conditional comment near the top of the head is an easy workaround.

2 - If you can, move the javascript out of the head and put it at the end of your pages (you will likely have to move any inline script too). It won’t help the technical onload time much but the user experience will be a LOT better (page will display a lot faster).

3 - Why are you serving ga.js from your domain? If you use the standard Google domain it will probably already be in users caches.

[TheJaspMan]

@pmeenan

I wouldn’t worry about cookie usage - the impact of that would hardly be measurable. Looking at the waterfall, a couple of things jump out:

1 - The IE conditional comment after the carousel is causing IE to block ( Conditional comments block downloads / Stoyan's phpied.com ) - putting a simple empty conditional comment near the top of the head is an easy workaround.

2 - If you can, move the javascript out of the head and put it at the end of your pages (you will likely have to move any inline script too). It won’t help the technical onload time much but the user experience will be a LOT better (page will display a lot faster).

3 - Why are you serving ga.js from your domain? If you use the standard Google domain it will probably already be in users caches.

Thank you for the prompt and detailed feedback.

I noticed the cookie issue resolved themselves a little yesterday while moving some items to a CDN. However it seems as the things are not as smooth from the CDN as they were when everything was hosted in one group. That could be my imagination though.

I’ll take a look at issue #1 shortly. I am not really clear on it, but may be once I actually pull it up in front of me.

For issue #2 I have pretty much done this on all the pages that I can that don’t seem to hose things up in my eCommerce area.

#3 To be quite honest, I was told it would speed things up in general and did seem to cut back some on the load time. I would be happy to add it back the other way and rerun to compare though.

[TheJaspMan]

@pmeenan

I wouldn’t worry about cookie usage - the impact of that would hardly be measurable. Looking at the waterfall, a couple of things jump out:

1 - The IE conditional comment after the carousel is causing IE to block ( Conditional comments block downloads / Stoyan's phpied.com ) - putting a simple empty conditional comment near the top of the head is an easy workaround.

2 - If you can, move the javascript out of the head and put it at the end of your pages (you will likely have to move any inline script too). It won’t help the technical onload time much but the user experience will be a LOT better (page will display a lot faster).

3 - Why are you serving ga.js from your domain? If you use the standard Google domain it will probably already be in users caches.

Here is the last test of the night:

WebPageTest

#1 I am not sure if I did that properly.

#2 I merged several scripts into one. And place at the very bottom. Three seperate files load. Unfortunatly the largest script is loaded in the first file.

#3 I switched the ga.js back to a pull from Google.

Does this look any better over all? I did drop from a 95 to a 94 in performance, but the overall load seems to have went down.

[alouty]

I notice that your jquery-1.7.1.min.js is 94.2 KB but my jquery-1.7.2.min.js is 33.2 KB after compressed. 3x small than yours…

[TheJaspMan]

@alouty

I notice that your jquery-1.7.1.min.js is 94.2 KB but my jquery-1.7.2.min.js is 33.2 KB after compressed. 3x small than yours…

There are 3-4 scripts that run on every page. I merged them all into the jquery script. It’s def larger, but loads faster then the individual scripts did.

[pmeenan]

Looks good (and yes, you did get the conditional comment fix correct). Don’t worry about the score, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with performance and is generally a list of things to look at. Far more important is the actual performance.

You’re about as fast as you’re going to be able to get without moving the remaining javascript out of the top of the page. Only other thing that comes to mind is to make sure the photos are progressive jpegs. Since they are all downloading concurrently that will help get them displayed on screen sooner.

[TheJaspMan]

@pmeenan

Looks good (and yes, you did get the conditional comment fix correct). Don’t worry about the score, it doesn’t necessarily correlate with performance and is generally a list of things to look at. Far more important is the actual performance.

You’re about as fast as you’re going to be able to get without moving the remaining javascript out of the top of the page. Only other thing that comes to mind is to make sure the photos are progressive jpegs. Since they are all downloading concurrently that will help get them displayed on screen sooner.

I appreciate the feedback and assistance. I’m glad you told me it’s about as quick as it will get. I have been obsessing over it.