Search engines rank faster loading websites higher. Here is how you can speed up load times with bundling and minification

Bundling and minification

Bundling and minification are two techniques you can use in One.NET to improve request load time. Bundling improves load time by reducing the number of requests to the server.

Most of the current major browsers limit the number of simultaneous connections per each hostname to six.

That means whilst those six requests are being processed, additional requests for assets on a host will be queued by the browser.

This first image shows my home page loading without bundling and minification.

So, if you bundle 12 JavaScript and CSS files into 2 bundles of six they will download faster.

This image shows the load time improvement after bundling and minification.

As you can see page load was reduced by almost half - from 3 seconds to almost 1.6 seconds. Search engines penalise slow sites so bundling and minification can help your SEO too!

To enable bundling and minification on IIS applications set compilation debug="false" under system.web in your Web.Config file

These two graphics are snapshots. It really requires much more data, collected at different times of the day, over a long period.

If you want to test your own website page loading times I can really recommend WebPageTest.org

Conclusion

Bundling advantages are not obvious until you know that browsers queue and limit requests, then wait for that to load.