How to load your webpage faster?
Your webpage takes eons to load up driving away your customers, this just might be the way to win them back!
This article is not directly related to cybersec / hacking, it can be helpful to understand how to carry recon. This article entails the project I have been working on. Quite useful for web-devs & webpage analysts.
Let’s Begin!
I have been working on this small project for my friend where he is supposed to analyse the webpage of his clients and he is to provide them with a better solution as to how they can decrease the webpage load time of their website.
The whole idea was to focus upon to boost up the load speed and decrease the time it takes to present their website to their customers. The problem we were struggling with was that there was not a single website that could be the one stop for all the solutions. Some website provided us with information which was too less to figure anything out other websites focused mostly on one part of the solution leaving out the others. So, this article I have tried to summarise the free tools you can use to carry out your own analysis on your webpage very easily.
Time to dive in!
So, one by one I will be showing the tools we used to analyse the problems the site might have and what advises we came up for the client so that they could speed up the loading of their webpage. ( I will be taking NASA as example)
Website
The first thing we did was research about the client and what are the services they are providing to their customers. Depending on the information gathered we kept on making mental notes as to what is the priority of the website we will be working on. For example a banking website has security as their utmost focus i.e. JavaScript whereas the look of the webpage doesn’t matter i.e. HTML & CSS, but for an online live video streaming website security might not be that big a deal but the delivery speed of the content and the outlook of the website is extremely important.
DNSDumpster
Once we were done with that then we went over to DNSDumpster to figure out information regarding the servers hosting the webpage, their locations and the IP addresses of the DNS servers and their names. These give us an idea about how the webpage is hosted and right from this step we can start to make notes as to how we can improve the webpage load time.
When the servers are hosted at a lot of different places it becomes harder for the website to grab the content from these servers and present to you very swiftly thus increasing the time to load the webpage.
That said I also need to add that at the same time having just one server is bad too as due to high load on the web server the lag due to bandwidth clogging can be seen and if under some unforeseen situation the web server goes down then the whole web page will be rendered unavailable.
DNSDumpster is also really helpful when it comes to figuring out the sub-domains of the given website. This also gives us the idea of how big the website is in itself so accordingly we can decide whether the number of servers required to keep the webpage up can be considered to be fine or excessive waste of resources.
WebPage Test
This is the single most important tool you will encounter regarding testing the speed of the website how it loads. It provides you with various parameters that helps you analyse the capability of the website.
Terminologies like Load Time, First Byte are very important. Document Complete and Fully Loaded tables are extremely important as well.
The waterfall method is the best tool designed to properly asses how the webpage is loaded, the number of request the webpage is making, the addresses the webpage is making those requests to and the time each of those request takes to complete all these analysis can be done in the waterfall method.
There are many more tools present on this website what makes this best website regarding web page test. To understand them properly I will have to write another article on that, if you need it do post in the comments below.
Pentest-Tool
This one tool that I have used here is actually paid, but they do provide you 40 free credits a day. You can use those to carry out your basic test on the webpage but the one most important test that you need to carry out is the webserver scan.
These provide a detailed description of the services that the website uses for it backend and frontend. This can be really helpful as the developers can be reminded to update the softwares as the legacy softwares can be easy to handle but at the same time they might not be able to handle the complexities of the modern websites and they also carry a lot of security risk which are found over the time.
They also provide a security header check which are really important from the security point of view.
SSL Labs
Well, as we are talking about security we also check how secure the certificate for that website is. To carry out this particular test we use SSL Labs. They give us a diagnosis regarding the certificate the website is using for its SSL connection where it measures the security of the SSL certificate under the given parameters.
An example of the output is given below to give you how thorough check SSL Labs carry out on the website to ensure the security, validity and encryption used for the certificate.
Alexa Analytics & Google Speed Insight
Once you have carried out the above test and diagnosis over the website of your client you can also carry out the webpage analytics provided by Google and Amazon.
Alexa analytics give you a proper idea of the webpage traffic and its origin, it can be helpful depending on the traffic you can tell them to enhance their market strategy and also place the web servers accordingly to provide the users with better connectivity.
Google’s speed insight gives you a short depiction of how your webpage performs when it is loaded on a desktop or on a mobile platform. It’s a small format can be useful to add to your presentation where you have to show the client the results you have found.
The end is near!
Well, you have reached to the end of the article, you surely are a dedicated reader. Jokes apart there is a lot of depth in the tools that I have described and you have to figure it out yourself. If there is anything else that you need to ask feel free to comment below or contact me on twitter.
If you enjoyed it please do clap & let’s collaborate. Get, Set, Hack!
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