Optimized Performance

The speed of a website is a key factor in its reach. Search engines pay attention to loading times for the classification of the page in the search results. In addition, site visitors are not particularly forgiving with slow websites, often leaving them after a few seconds.

For these reasons, we place a great deal of emphasis on speed optimization in the development and improvement of the Website-Base.

We use HTTP/2 with Server Side Push in our website base by default. HTTP/2 is the successor of HTTP/1.1 and is an improved version of the HTTP protocol.

A protocol manages the communication between a browser (client), which requests information, and the server, which contains requested data. The client sends requests to the server. The server responds and provides the requested information. While HTTP/1.1 can only process one request per TCP connection and each additional request requires a further TCP connection, HTTP/2 is able to bundle several requests over one connection and to pass on several responses simultaneously. HTTP/2 thus counteracts TCP overloads.

The server-side push function is another key feature of HTTP/2, where the server sends information to the client that the client has not yet requested. However, the server knows from the previous requests that further information is needed and 'pushes' it. CSS stylesheets, for example, are such information - they are necessary to display the page. The pushed data is stored in the browser's cache and can be used at any time, thus reducing network latency (delay in data transmission).

Overall, HTTP/2 results in shorter waiting times for users. Network resources are better managed. It also optimizes the communication between client and server.

Usually, when loading a website, all images are loaded completely. This results in a noticeably higher loading time. For websites with many high-resolution images and/or with many videos, this mechanism is particularly disadvantageous. With lazy loading, images are only loaded when they are actually needed and reach the visible area for the user. Elements that are visible when the page is called up are therefore loaded immediately. This optimization technique thus delays the loading of images that are not (yet) needed. This reduces the initial loading time of a page. But also the total required data volume is reduced, because some images never have to be loaded.

The Website-Base is configured in such a way that pages are rendered once on their first call-up according to their backend configuration and then stored as a static HTML file on the server. As long as this page remains unchanged in the backend, only the already prepared HTML file will be sent to each subsequent visitor. This form of caching can speed up loading times of your website many times over. This is especially true for pages that contain many media elements, such as pictures and videos, because they do not need to be reformatted each time the page is called.

In order to make better use of this function, images are responsively integrated by the Website-Base.

After adding an image, it can be formatted in the backend for different screen sizes. When the page is called, the website responds to the device used and outputs the appropriate formatting. Images that were stored, for example, with a size of 4000 x 3000 pixels and are called on a mobile phone screen with 300px width, get prepared on the server side, so that the user does not load the full file size when loading the page, but an automatically created, much smaller file gets sent.

The prepared pages are also saved in the static cache so that the compression process does not have to be performed every time a page is called. This significantly reduces the load time of the website.

It is also possible to integrate large images in a smaller format and to enlarge them with a click on the image. When the page is called, only the small image is loaded from the server, the full file only when it is needed in the enlarged view.

Certain page sections are accessed most often from mobile devices. These areas may be provided by the website base as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a minimalist, mobile-ready version of the pages.