Critical rendering path optimizations to reduce the web page loading time

Abstract

In recent times, the websites have become complex. They are made up of a lot of content like videos, images, Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets(CSS). Because of too much content, the website gets heavy and takes more time to load. On the other hand, users prefer faster loading websites. Slower websites means unhappy users, who in turn abandon the sites in preference to faster sites. To overcome this, the websites should be optimized. Research shows that the complexity of websites is characterized at two levels - content and service. The focus of this work is to optimize the content level complexity. It is observed that reduction in critical rendering path length of a page results in less page load times. Critical rendering path is the set of processing steps a browser goes through for completely rendering a page. So, the idea of the project is to optimize the parameters impacting the critical rendering path length. The parameters under consideration are images, CSS and Javascript. These optimizations are tested on a website having images and text both in proportion.