Make it snappy

The front-end of TCTransit.mobi makes use of a few simple enhancements that improve load time for mobile users. The results of each optimization are rather surprising. If you’re working on your own mobile web application, it’s worth the extra effort to include a few optimizations, such as these:

1. Gzipped Assets.
All HTML and CSS automatically Gzipped by the web server. This provides a tremendous gain in load times.

2. “Minified” CSS.
In addition to being gzipped, CSS assets are slimmed down.

3. “Minified” HTML output.
All HTML is dynamically stripped of whitespace, comments, and other clutter, and served in fewer lines. You’d be surprised that this shaves off a few more kilobytes on larger pages.

4. Cut down on image requests.
The few images that are used on this site are base64-encoded and embedded in the CSS code, omitting extra HTTP requests.

The back-end is served by a combination of PHP, Memcached, and Nginx. The three work together to provide a snappy front-end, bringing you quicker load times.

For more information on making your site faster, check out Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site.

There are definitely more optimizations I could make, but my forthcoming efforts will target new features.