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Creative Commons photo credit: Richard Masoner
Structural changes that translate into faster page loads
12/3/2016 3:05:01 PM
Michael Tangn
This weekend, we pushed out one of the most labor-intensive updates to all sites hosted on the SDL Tridion platform. These updates in the end translate to faster page load times — on the order of reducing the page render time by up to 25% — and also enable us to make further Javascript- and jQuery-based improvements in the future with less invasiveness. The updates involved changing where various jQuery scripts were located and loaded and required that all sites undergo a site-wide republish — a daunting task for sites like DEED, DHS, and MMB where thousands of pages had to be republished.
In the <head> tag, we removed the jQuery file from the core.js page assembly, moved core.js to the footer, and loaded the jQuery library independently in the <head> tag. This change allows the page content to load independently and any jQuery processes to run after a majority of the content has been loaded. This change alone has resulted in an average 20-25% reduction in page rendering time.
Additionally, we've moved both top and left navigation scripts to the core.js page assembly, which affords us the opportunity to make further enhancements and improvements upon how both the top and left navigation is generated and rendered.
In the <header> region, we've removed the <h1> tag around the logo and site name and have replaced it with a <div> tag instead. This now puts the burden on you as content contributors to start out your content with an <h1> title in your content. This is easily accomplished by including a page introduction on your page, as that template displays the component title with an <h1> tag. While on a philosophical level there is no right or wrong answer to the question, "is it OK to have more than one <h1> tag on a page", in the end we've come around as a team to leave that decision up to you. So if your agency prefers to only have one <h1> tag per page, you are in control of that and can do so by the choices you make in content and component templates. But if you're agnostic on the issue and don't mind more than one <h1> on a page, you still have the option to do so, so long as you do so properly.
We have also updated jQuery to version 3.0 and jQuery UI to version 1.12 and have removed some of the jQuery UI feature that were not being used, thus also reducing total page load time for our end users. If your site uses custom jQuery that you or your developers have implemented, please test to ensure your code is compliant with this latest version. We encourage you to proactively test any custom jQuery that you create against new releases of the jQuery library to ensure their forward-compatibility.
There is the distinct possibility that a page may have been missed along the way. Though we've taken every measure to ensure we've re-published every structure group in your site, there is always the possibility that we may have missed something. If during the process of examining your website you notice a page that doesn't look right — symptoms including the top and left navigation do not work, and your footer links are not displaying in their proper columns — the fix is simple. Re-publish that page and it will inherit the new <head> tag changes. If after clearing your browser's cache, reloading the page, and it continues not to display correctly, open up a ticket with the MNIT Service Desk and we will look into it.
We've made every attempt to ensure that only pages that are currently published were published out to both stage and live. But should you find any pages that should not be published out there and are, we apologize for any inconvenience that it may have caused you. Simply un-publish the page and you should be all set.
A few of us on the Web Development team have been involved in the review process of all of your websites during this update, and frankly we've all noticed a dramatic difference in page response times and how much more snappier they are as a result of these changes. We hope that this improvement on page load performance leads to great returns for your agency and your website. Thank you so very much for your patience and flexibility during this very labor-intensive update process.
If you have any questions about this update process, please reach out to us and we can answer any questions you may have. Otherwise if you have support needs, please submit an incident ticket to the MNIT Service Desk and we'll jump on that right away.
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