Menu
The Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team recommend placing scripts at the bottom of your page because of the way browsers download components.
Of course Levi's comment "just before you need it and no sooner" is really the correct answer, i.e. "it depends".
The best place for it is just before you need it and no sooner.
Also, depending on your users' physical location, using a service like Amazon's S3 service may help users download it from a server physically closer to them than your server.
Is your js script a commonly used lib like jQuery or prototype? If so, there are a number of companies, like Google and Yahoo, that have tools to provide these files for you on a distributed network.
As a rule of thumb, the best place to put <script> tags is the bottom of the page, just before </body> tag. Something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My awesome page</title>
<!-- CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="...">
</head>
<body>
<!-- Content content content -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="..."></script>
</body>
</html>
The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames. More...
A little bit off-topic, but... Put stylesheets at the top.
While researching performance at Yahoo!, we discovered that moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively. More...
Yahoo have released a really cool guide that lists best practices to speed up a website. Definitely worth reading: https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
With 100k of Javascript, you should never put it inside the file. Use an external script Javascript file. There's no chance in hell you'll only ever use this amount of code in only one HTML page. Likely you're asking where you should load the Javascript file, for this you've received satisfactory answers already.
But I'd like to point out that commonly, modern browsers accept gzipped Javascript files! Just gzip the x.js file to x.js.gz, and point to that in the src attribute. It doesn't work on the local filesystem, you need a webserver for it to work. But the savings in transferred bytes can be enormous.
I've successfully tested it in Firefox 3, MSIE 7, Opera 9, and Google Chrome. It apparently doesn't work this way in Safari 3.
For more info, see this blog post, and another very ancient page that nevertheless is useful because it points out that the webserver can detect whether a browser can accept gzipped Javascript, or not. If your server side can dynamically choose to send the gzipped or the plain text, you can make the page usable in all web browsers.
Putting the javascript at the top would seem neater, but functionally, its better to go after the HTML. That way, your javascript won't run and try to reference HTML elements before they are loaded. This sort of problem often only becomes apparent when you load the page over an actual internet connection, especially a slow one.
You could also try to dynamically load the javascript by adding a header element from other javascript code, although that only makes sense if you aren't using all of the code all the time.
Using cuzillion you can test the affect on page load of different placement of script tags using different methods: inline, external, "HTML tags", "document.write", "JS DOM element", "iframe", and "XHR eval". See the help for an explanation of the differences. It can also test stylesheets, images and iframes.
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With