Category Archives: Website Speed

Improving Page Load Times in Safari

Safari is the web browser that is integrated into Mac OSX operating systems; this web browser is based upon Apple’s internal KHTML WebKit engine. While this web browser offers a decent browsing experience with other features, there are times when Safari can be slow. Typically, a slow down within Safari is due to corrupted cache files, add-ons, wrongly configured preference settings, or other issues. Luckily, there are some tips that Safari users may utilize to speed up the Safari web browser, and revert the browser back to default settings.

To begin with, the cache files, which are used to access recently visited sites easier, should be cleared. In order to do this, users may simply click on the Safari menu, and then hover over the option “Empty Cache.” Once this option has been selected, a dialog window will be presented to users explaining the process; at this point, they may go ahead and click on the OK option to clear the cache files from Safari. Furthermore, the Safari web browser may also be reset to clear the cache, erase cookies data, clear form data, and reset all other web browsing history as well. Users may reset Safari by clicking on the Safari menu, hovering over and clicking on the Reset Safari option. After clicking OK, the Safari web browser should successfully reset.

There are also other options that users may pursue to speed up the Safari web browser as well. For instance, browser add-ons, while beneficial, they can tend to consume vast amount of resources, which ultimately slows the Safari web browser down. In order to remove add-ons from Safari, users will need to open the Safari web browser, access the Help menu, and cursor over to and select the Installed Plug-Ins option. This will allow users to view the current add-ons on their system; once they have decided on the plug-in they’d like to remove, they can access: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ to find the specific add-on. Once found, users may simply remove the add-on to speed up Safari performance.

Last, but not least, returning the preference file to the default settings will also speed up browser web time, and possibly fix web page loading errors. For this to be accomplished, users may navigate to the Finder file manager in their Mac OSX operating system. Afterwards, they may then open the User folder, and navigate to /Library/Preferences/. Here, they will find a file labeled “com.apple.Safari.plist.” This file may be deleted to restore the preferences to default settings in the Safari web browser. Once these changes have been applied to Safari, users should notice an improvement in speed, and also usability of the Safari web browser.

Speed Testing in Mobile Browsers

Anyone who’s ever built a website for a mobile browser knows that it’s not always easy to optimize your site/application for speed across multiple mobile platforms, and one of the toughest issues is being able to test these platforms with a different number of browsers so that you can make the necessary changes.

A lot of developers actually blow these concerns off, which is evident from a number of support forums and pages where people complain about slow loading times and poor performance in mobile WordPress themes, and other mobile CMS systems. The thing at the forefront of most developer’s minds is optimizing their mobile sites to display correctly, but the developer community seems to be relatively aloof when it comes to keeping performance in mind as well.

Think about it for a second: it’s great if you have a mobile site that displays properly and has a creative menu structure/color scheme, but it’s not so great if you have a site that takes forever to load. It’s no secret that website visitors have shorter attention spans than ever before, so if you own a website with a mobile theme, you don’t have all the time in the world to make an impression; in fact, you have a very short amount of time to make an impression!

So what can you do? How do you test your mobile sites? Well, there are a few different options that the marketplace has to offer, both free and paid. If you’re looking for the “be all end all” tester of mobile platforms in terms of speed, CSS, and everything else, you probably want a paid service. One of the best in that arena is BrowserStack. They offer a pretty intuitive interface, and testing options galore. However, not everyone needs a full service suite just to perform a quick test. An honorable mention goes out to Dotcom-Monitor’s website speed test tool that has options for emulating iOS devices from the iPhone, iPod and even the iPad. While they don’t have any Android options on their tool, it’s quick and free if you need to troubleshoot a small problem.

At the end of the day, testing your speed and performance on mobile platforms is something that you shouldn’t overlook, with over 50% of today’s web traffic being from mobile devices! One thing that people do often overlook is the reliability of their web hosting company and how fast their servers are. If you’re wondering “who is the fastest host?” you’re not alone. There are a lot of different companies that claim to have speedy web servers but it’s hard to know which one is the fastest. The thing is, a speedy web server has a huge impact on the over all speed of your mobile site too, so that’s something to consider. Lastly, it’s easy to make sure that your CSS is correct and leave it at that, but you really need to do more than that if you want to captivate users and make sure that they have a good experience on your site.