Optimizing Your Responsive Sitecore Site's Performance

Creating a site that is accessible to your mobile users is vital in today’s world. This is why many Sitecore customers are choosing to build their site responsively. Responsive web design (RWD) refers to designing and building your site on grids and percentages to make your site respond to whatever device a visitor is using to give them the best possible experience.

Using RWD to build your Sitecore site will not eliminate the need to optimize your site’s performance to improve your user experience. How can you optimize your site for better performance?

• Asset Compression

  You can combine multiple JavaScript and CSS files and compress them (i.e. remove unnecessary white spaces or comments) to help improve load time.

• Customize Header Expiry / Caching

  The use of a custom expiry header means you can skip unnecessary HTTP request of assets (like images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) when you reload the page for the second time.

• Avoid Social Media Widgets

  Social media widgets make your page load slower, so it’s recommended that you try to avoid them to improve your site’s performance.

• Image Optimization

  If your images are not properly optimized, they can end up using a large amount of bandwidth on a daily basis. To help reduce this load, be sure to export your image files to formats like JPEG, GIF, or PNG that are designed for the web. Also, be sure not to scale your images.

Having a site for your mobile users is important, but if the performance is poor, is it really better than having not mobile site at all? Even though you may build your site responsively, it’s even more important to make sure that your site is optimized to provide the best possible experience for your mobile users.

Want to learn more about responsive web design in Sitecore? Download our free ebook today.