5 Steps to Slowing Down Your Site

...Because who even cares about customer experience, right?

Are you tired of providing a satisfactory experience to your web site visitors? Do you loathe the fact that your competitors look at your performance metrics as the ones to beat? Those Facebook “likes” and social sentiment from your happy customers—want to get rid of them? Well hold on tight, folks–you’re abut to learn the top five ways to make your website load as slow as molasses.

HTTP Requests

There’s no better way to slow your website down than to have an excessive amount of requests. Sprites, concatenated JavaScript, and CSS files will only speed things up. Why limit yourself to 70 or 80 requests when you can have 700 or 800?

Text Based Compression and Maxification

Have you been compressing text-based content? If so, stop. Compressing text-based content will only speed things up and improve your customer experience. That being said, don’t stop compressing things altogether, though. If you want to hit that snail’s pace, you should definitely compress binaries and compressed images like JPEG’s. Double compressing files is a failsafe way to slow things down. While you’re at it, add plenty of white space and comments to your JavaScript and CSS files. If your users ever decide to look at them, you want to make it easy for them to read your code.

Keep-Alive

If you are using keep-alive, turn that bad boy off! You want the browser to open a brand new connection for each and every one of the hundreds of requests you make.

Synchronous Loading of JavaScript

Are you truly dedicated to slowing down your website? Try loading and executing your JavaScript synchronously. That way if one JavaScript file gets hung-up, nothing else on the page loads. Nothing else adds agonizing time to your users’ visits quite like synchronous loads.

Images

Make your images as big and rich as possible. Use the full 12 mega-pixel image and don’t even think about compressing it. You want your users to see every blemish and little speck of dust in the images you use.

These five tips are just the low hanging fruit. There are plenty of ways to slow your site down; all you have to do is be a little creative.