Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Minimize HTTP Requests

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.

Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.

CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.

Image maps combine multiple images into a single image. The overall size is about the same, but reducing the number of HTTP requests speeds up the page. Image maps only work if the images are contiguous in the page, such as a navigation bar. Defining the coordinates of image maps can be tedious and error prone. Using image maps for navigation is not accessible too, so it's not recommended.

Inline images use the data: URL scheme to embed the image data in the actual page. This can increase the size of your HTML document. Combining inline images into your (cached) stylesheets is a way to reduce HTTP requests and avoid increasing the size of your pages. Inline images are not yet supported across all major browsers.

Reducing the number of HTTP requests in your page is the place to start. This is the most important guideline for improving performance for first time visitors. As described in Tenni Theurer's blog post Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!, 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache. Making your page fast for these first time visitors is key to a better user experience.

Use a Content Delivery Network

The user's proximity to your web server has an impact on response times. Deploying your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make your pages load faster from the user's perspective. But where should you start?
As a first step to implementing geographically dispersed content, don't attempt to redesign your web application to work in a distributed architecture. Depending on the application, changing the architecture could include daunting tasks such as synchronizing session state and replicating database transactions across server locations. Attempts to reduce the distance between users and your content could be delayed by, or never pass, this application architecture step.
Remember that 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. This is the Performance Golden Rule. Rather than starting with the difficult task of redesigning your application architecture, it's better to first disperse your static content. This not only achieves a bigger reduction in response times, but it's easier thanks to content delivery networks.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.
Some large Internet companies own their own CDN, but it's cost-effective to use a CDN service provider, such as Akamai Technologies, EdgeCast, or level3. For start-up companies and private web sites, the cost of a CDN service can be prohibitive, but as your target audience grows larger and becomes more global, a CDN is necessary to achieve fast response times. At Yahoo!, properties that moved static content off their application web servers to a CDN (both 3rd party as mentioned above as well as Yahoo’s own CDN) improved end-user response times by 20% or more. Switching to a CDN is a relatively easy code change that will dramatically improve the speed of your web site.

Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header

There are two aspects to this rule:

• For static components: implement "Never expire" policy by setting far future Expires header
• For dynamic components: use an appropriate Cache-Control header to help the browser with conditional requests

Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.
Browsers (and proxies) use a cache to reduce the number and size of HTTP requests, making web pages load faster. A web server uses the Expires header in the HTTP response to tell the client how long a component can be cached. This is a far future Expires header, telling the browser that this response won't be stale until April 15, 2010.

      Expires: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT

If your server is Apache, use the ExpiresDefault directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. This example of the ExpiresDefault directive sets the Expires date 10 years out from the time of the request.

      ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"

Keep in mind, if you use a far future Expires header you have to change the component's filename whenever the component changes. At Yahoo! we often make this step part of the build process: a version number is embedded in the component's filename, for example, yahoo_2.0.6.js.
Using a far future Expires header affects page views only after a user has already visited your site. It has no effect on the number of HTTP requests when a user visits your site for the first time and the browser's cache is empty. Therefore the impact of this performance improvement depends on how often users hit your pages with a primed cache. (A "primed cache" already contains all of the components in the page.) We measured this at Yahoo! and found the number of page views with a primed cache is 75-85%. By using a far future Expires header, you increase the number of components that are cached by the browser and re-used on subsequent page views without sending a single byte over the user's Internet connection.

Gzip Components

The time it takes to transfer an HTTP request and response across the network can be significantly reduced by decisions made by front-end engineers. It's true that the end-user's bandwidth speed, Internet service provider, proximity to peering exchange points, etc. are beyond the control of the development team. But there are other variables that affect response times. Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response.
Starting with HTTP/1.1, web clients indicate support for compression with the Accept-Encoding header in the HTTP request.

      Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

If the web server sees this header in the request, it may compress the response using one of the methods listed by the client. The web server notifies the web client of this via the Content-Encoding header in the response.

      Content-Encoding: gzip

Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method at this time. It was developed by the GNU project and standardized by RFC 1952. The only other compression format you're likely to see is deflate, but it's less effective and less popular.
Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today's Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip. If you use Apache, the module configuring gzip depends on your version: Apache 1.3 uses mod_gzip while Apache 2.x uses mod_deflate.
There are known issues with browsers and proxies that may cause a mismatch in what the browser expects and what it receives with regard to compressed content. Fortunately, these edge cases are dwindling as the use of older browsers drops off. The Apache modules help out by adding appropriate Vary response headers automatically.
Servers choose what to gzip based on file type, but are typically too limited in what they decide to compress. Most web sites gzip their HTML documents. It's also worthwhile to gzip your scripts and stylesheets, but many web sites miss this opportunity. In fact, it's worthwhile to compress any text response including XML and JSON. Image and PDF files should not be gzipped because they are already compressed. Trying to gzip them not only wastes CPU but can potentially increase file sizes.
Gzipping as many file types as possible is an easy way to reduce page weight and accelerate the user experience.

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.
Front-end engineers that care about performance want a page to load progressively; that is, we want the browser to display whatever content it has as soon as possible. This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections. The importance of giving users visual feedback, such as progress indicators, has been well researched and documented. In our case the HTML page is the progress indicator! When the browser loads the page progressively the header, the navigation bar, the logo at the top, etc. all serve as visual feedback for the user who is waiting for the page. This improves the overall user experience.
The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.
The HTML specification clearly states that stylesheets are to be included in the HEAD of the page: "Unlike A, [LINK] may only appear in the HEAD section of a document, although it may appear any number of times." Neither of the alternatives, the blank white screen or flash of unstyled content, are worth the risk. The optimal solution is to follow the HTML specification and load your stylesheets in the document HEAD.

Put Scripts at the Bottom

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.
In some situations it's not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses document.write to insert part of the page's content, it can't be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations.
An alternative suggestion that often comes up is to use deferred scripts. The DEFER attribute indicates that the script does not contain document.write, and is a clue to browsers that they can continue rendering. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't support the DEFER attribute. In Internet Explorer, the script may be deferred, but not as much as desired. If a script can be deferred, it can also be moved to the bottom of the page. That will make your web pages load faster.

Avoid CSS Expressions

CSS expressions are a powerful (and dangerous) way to set CSS properties dynamically. They were supported in Internet Explorer starting with version 5, but were deprecated starting with IE8. As an example, the background color could be set to alternate every hour using CSS expressions:

      background-color: expression( (new Date()).getHours()%2 ? "#B8D4FF" : "#F08A00" );

As shown here, the expression method accepts a JavaScript expression. The CSS property is set to the result of evaluating the JavaScript expression. The expression method is ignored by other browsers, so it is useful for setting properties in Internet Explorer needed to create a consistent experience across browsers.
The problem with expressions is that they are evaluated more frequently than most people expect. Not only are they evaluated when the page is rendered and resized, but also when the page is scrolled and even when the user moves the mouse over the page. Adding a counter to the CSS expression allows us to keep track of when and how often a CSS expression is evaluated. Moving the mouse around the page can easily generate more than 10,000 evaluations.
One way to reduce the number of times your CSS expression is evaluated is to use one-time expressions, where the first time the expression is evaluated it sets the style property to an explicit value, which replaces the CSS expression. If the style property must be set dynamically throughout the life of the page, using event handlers instead of CSS expressions is an alternative approach. If you must use CSS expressions, remember that they may be evaluated thousands of times and could affect the performance of your page.

Make JavaScript and CSS External

Many of these performance rules deal with how external components are managed. However, before these considerations arise you should ask a more basic question: Should JavaScript and CSS be contained in external files, or inlined in the page itself?
Using external files in the real world generally produces faster pages because the JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser. JavaScript and CSS that are inlined in HTML documents get downloaded every time the HTML document is requested. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that are needed, but increases the size of the HTML document. On the other hand, if the JavaScript and CSS are in external files cached by the browser, the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests.
The key factor, then, is the frequency with which external JavaScript and CSS components are cached relative to the number of HTML documents requested. This factor, although difficult to quantify, can be gauged using various metrics. If users on your site have multiple page views per session and many of your pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, there is a greater potential benefit from cached external files.
Many web sites fall in the middle of these metrics. For these sites, the best solution generally is to deploy the JavaScript and CSS as external files. The only exception where inlining is preferable is with home pages, such as Yahoo!'s front page and My Yahoo!. Home pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times.
For front pages that are typically the first of many page views, there are techniques that leverage the reduction of HTTP requests that inlining provides, as well as the caching benefits achieved through using external files. One such technique is to inline JavaScript and CSS in the front page, but dynamically download the external files after the page has finished loading. Subsequent pages would reference the external files that should already be in the browser's cache.

Reduce DNS Lookups

The Domain Name System (DNS) maps hostnames to IP addresses, just as phonebooks map people's names to their phone numbers. When you type www.yahoo.com into your browser, a DNS resolver contacted by the browser returns that server's IP address. DNS has a cost. It typically takes 20-120 milliseconds for DNS to lookup the IP address for a given hostname. The browser can't download anything from this hostname until the DNS lookup is completed.
DNS lookups are cached for better performance. This caching can occur on a special caching server, maintained by the user's ISP or local area network, but there is also caching that occurs on the individual user's computer. The DNS information remains in the operating system's DNS cache (the "DNS Client service" on Microsoft Windows). Most browsers have their own caches, separate from the operating system's cache. As long as the browser keeps a DNS record in its own cache, it doesn't bother the operating system with a request for the record.
Internet Explorer caches DNS lookups for 30 minutes by default, as specified by the DnsCacheTimeout registry setting. Firefox caches DNS lookups for 1 minute, controlled by the network.dnsCacheExpiration configuration setting. (Fasterfox changes this to 1 hour.)
When the client's DNS cache is empty (for both the browser and the operating system), the number of DNS lookups is equal to the number of unique hostnames in the web page. This includes the hostnames used in the page's URL, images, script files, stylesheets, Flash objects, etc. Reducing the number of unique hostnames reduces the number of DNS lookups.
Reducing the number of unique hostnames has the potential to reduce the amount of parallel downloading that takes place in the page. Avoiding DNS lookups cuts response times, but reducing parallel downloads may increase response times. My guideline is to split these components across at least two but no more than four hostnames. This results in a good compromise between reducing DNS lookups and allowing a high degree of parallel downloads.

Minify JavaScript and CSS

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. Two popular tools for minifying JavaScript code are JSMin and YUI Compressor. The YUI compressor can also minify CSS.
Obfuscation is an alternative optimization that can be applied to source code. It's more complex than minification and thus more likely to generate bugs as a result of the obfuscation step itself. In a survey of ten top U.S. web sites, minification achieved a 21% size reduction versus 25% for obfuscation. Although obfuscation has a higher size reduction, minifying JavaScript is less risky.
In addition to minifying external scripts and styles, inlined

An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called insertScript.

In addition to preventing the same script from being inserted multiple times, this function could handle other issues with scripts, such as dependency checking and adding version numbers to script filenames to support far future Expires headers.

Configure ETags

Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism that web servers and browsers use to determine whether the component in the browser's cache matches the one on the origin server. (An "entity" is another word a "component": images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) ETags were added to provide a mechanism for validating entities that is more flexible than the last-modified date. An ETag is a string that uniquely identifies a specific version of a component. The only format constraints are that the string be quoted. The origin server specifies the component's ETag using the ETag response header.

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Last-Modified: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 03:03:59 GMT
      ETag: "10c24bc-4ab-457e1c1f"
      Content-Length: 12195

Later, if the browser has to validate a component, it uses the If-None-Match header to pass the ETag back to the origin server. If the ETags match, a 304 status code is returned reducing the response by 12195 bytes for this example.

      GET /i/yahoo.gif HTTP/1.1
      Host: us.yimg.com
      If-Modified-Since: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 03:03:59 GMT
      If-None-Match: "10c24bc-4ab-457e1c1f"
      HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified

The problem with ETags is that they typically are constructed using attributes that make them unique to a specific server hosting a site. ETags won't match when a browser gets the original component from one server and later tries to validate that component on a different server, a situation that is all too common on Web sites that use a cluster of servers to handle requests. By default, both Apache and IIS embed data in the ETag that dramatically reduces the odds of the validity test succeeding on web sites with multiple servers.
The ETag format for Apache 1.3 and 2.x is inode-size-timestamp. Although a given file may reside in the same directory across multiple servers, and have the same file size, permissions, timestamp, etc., its inode is different from one server to the next.
IIS 5.0 and 6.0 have a similar issue with ETags. The format for ETags on IIS is Filetimestamp:ChangeNumber. A ChangeNumber is a counter used to track configuration changes to IIS. It's unlikely that the ChangeNumber is the same across all IIS servers behind a web site.
The end result is ETags generated by Apache and IIS for the exact same component won't match from one server to another. If the ETags don't match, the user doesn't receive the small, fast 304 response that ETags were designed for; instead, they'll get a normal 200 response along with all the data for the component. If you host your web site on just one server, this isn't a problem. But if you have multiple servers hosting your web site, and you're using Apache or IIS with the default ETag configuration, your users are getting slower pages, your servers have a higher load, you're consuming greater bandwidth, and proxies aren't caching your content efficiently. Even if your components have a far future Expires header, a conditional GET request is still made whenever the user hits Reload or Refresh.
If you're not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, it's better to just remove the ETag altogether. The Last-Modified header validates based on the component's timestamp. And removing the ETag reduces the size of the HTTP headers in both the response and subsequent requests. This Microsoft Support article describes how to remove ETags. In Apache, this is done by simply adding the following line to your Apache configuration file:

      FileETag none

Make Ajax Cacheable

One of the cited benefits of Ajax is that it provides instantaneous feedback to the user because it requests information asynchronously from the backend web server. However, using Ajax is no guarantee that the user won't be twiddling his thumbs waiting for those asynchronous JavaScript and XML responses to return. In many applications, whether or not the user is kept waiting depends on how Ajax is used. For example, in a web-based email client the user will be kept waiting for the results of an Ajax request to find all the email messages that match their search criteria. It's important to remember that "asynchronous" does not imply "instantaneous".
To improve performance, it's important to optimize these Ajax responses. The most important way to improve the performance of Ajax is to make the responses cacheable, as discussed in Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header. Some of the other rules also apply to Ajax:

• Gzip Components
  
• Reduce DNS Lookups
  
• Minify JavaScript
  
• Avoid Redirects
  
• Configure ETags
  

Let's look at an example. A Web 2.0 email client might use Ajax to download the user's address book for autocompletion. If the user hasn't modified her address book since the last time she used the email web app, the previous address book response could be read from cache if that Ajax response was made cacheable with a future Expires or Cache-Control header. The browser must be informed when to use a previously cached address book response versus requesting a new one. This could be done by adding a timestamp to the address book Ajax URL indicating the last time the user modified her address book, for example, &t=1190241612. If the address book hasn't been modified since the last download, the timestamp will be the same and the address book will be read from the browser's cache eliminating an extra HTTP roundtrip. If the user has modified her address book, the timestamp ensures the new URL doesn't match the cached response, and the browser will request the updated address book entries.
Even though your Ajax responses are created dynamically, and might only be applicable to a single user, they can still be cached. Doing so will make your Web 2.0 apps faster.

Flush the Buffer Early

When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.
A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
Example:

      ... 
    

...
Yahoo! search pioneered research and real user testing to prove the benefits of using this technique.

Use GET for AJAX Requests

The Yahoo! Mail team found that when using XMLHttpRequest, POST is implemented in the browsers as a two-step process: sending the headers first, then sending data. So it's best to use GET, which only takes one TCP packet to send (unless you have a lot of cookies). The maximum URL length in IE is 2K, so if you send more than 2K data you might not be able to use GET.
An interesting side affect is that POST without actually posting any data behaves like GET. Based on the HTTP specs, GET is meant for retrieving information, so it makes sense (semantically) to use GET when you're only requesting data, as opposed to sending data to be stored server-side.

Post-load Components

You can take a closer look at your page and ask yourself: "What's absolutely required in order to render the page initially?". The rest of the content and components can wait.
JavaScript is an ideal candidate for splitting before and after the onload event. For example if you have JavaScript code and libraries that do drag and drop and animations, those can wait, because dragging elements on the page comes after the initial rendering. Other places to look for candidates for post-loading include hidden content (content that appears after a user action) and images below the fold.
Tools to help you out in your effort: YUI Image Loader allows you to delay images below the fold and the YUI Get utility is an easy way to include JS and CSS on the fly. For an example in the wild take a look at Yahoo! Home Page with Firebug's Net Panel turned on.
It's good when the performance goals are inline with other web development best practices. In this case, the idea of progressive enhancement tells us that JavaScript, when supported, can improve the user experience but you have to make sure the page works even without JavaScript. So after you've made sure the page works fine, you can enhance it with some post-loaded scripts that give you more bells and whistles such as drag and drop and animations.

Preload Components

Preload may look like the opposite of post-load, but it actually has a different goal. By preloading components you can take advantage of the time the browser is idle and request components (like images, styles and scripts) you'll need in the future. This way when the user visits the next page, you could have most of the components already in the cache and your page will load much faster for the user.
There are actually several types of preloading:

• Unconditional preload - as soon as onload fires, you go ahead and fetch some extra components. Check google.com for an example of how a sprite image is requested onload. This sprite image is not needed on the google.com homepage, but it is needed on the consecutive search result page.
• Conditional preload - based on a user action you make an educated guess where the user is headed next and preload accordingly. On search.yahoo.com you can see how some extra components are requested after you start typing in the input box.
• Anticipated preload - preload in advance before launching a redesign. It often happens after a redesign that you hear: "The new site is cool, but it's slower than before". Part of the problem could be that the users were visiting your old site with a full cache, but the new one is always an empty cache experience. You can mitigate this side effect by preloading some components before you even launched the redesign. Your old site can use the time the browser is idle and request images and scripts that will be used by the new site

Reduce the Number of DOM Elements

A complex page means more bytes to download and it also means slower DOM access in JavaScript. It makes a difference if you loop through 500 or 5000 DOM elements on the page when you want to add an event handler for example.
A high number of DOM elements can be a symptom that there's something that should be improved with the markup of the page without necessarily removing content. Are you using nested tables for layout purposes? Are you throwing in more

s only to fix layout issues? Maybe there's a better and more semantically correct way to do your markup.
A great help with layouts are the YUI CSS utilities: grids.css can help you with the overall layout, fonts.css and reset.css can help you strip away the browser's defaults formatting. This is a chance to start fresh and think about your markup, for example use

s only when it makes sense semantically, and not because it renders a new line.
The number of DOM elements is easy to test, just type in Firebug's console:
document.getElementsByTagName('*').length
And how many DOM elements are too many? Check other similar pages that have good markup. For example the Yahoo! Home Page is a pretty busy page and still under 700 elements (HTML tags).

Split Components Across Domains

Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org
For more information check "Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane" by Tenni Theurer and Patty Chi.

Minimize the Number of iframes

Iframes allow an HTML document to be inserted in the parent document. It's important to understand how iframes work so they can be used effectively.

60 Best jQuery Plugins

jQuery is one of the most popular javascript Libraries on the web, and almost every developer and designer are familiar with jquery’s functionality and features. jQuery resolves almost every issue and fits to your website requirements to make your website creative and innovative.
Every month number of jQuery plugins released all over the web, Here at WebToolsDepot we searched and have amassed 60 Best jQuery plugins released in 2013, We hope following plugins might help you to enhance your websites by making them multifunctional, user friendly and visually creative. If you think few more should be added in the list, please mention into the comment section, we love to hear from you. Enjoy!!

1. Typehead.js

Twitter has open sourced a very nice project named Typeahead.js for building smart auto-complete form fields. It comes as a jQuery plugin, shows suggestion as-users-type and can feature top suggestions with the help of styling. The plugin can work with both local or remote datasets and it is optimized for speed as it can prefetch the dataset, store it on the client-side and run the queries quickly.

2. Perfect Scrollbar

Perfect Scrollbar is a lightweight (14kb) jQuery plugin for creating them without any hassle. It doesn’t ruin the default layout or require/apply any CSS changes. The plugin works with containers of any size and re-arranges the positions if a container-resize happens. Also, the design of the scrollbar can be customized completely with CSSand it supports jquery-mousewheel plugin in case you want to make use of it.

3. iLightbox

iLightBox is a fresh alternative to other jQuery lightbox plugins and there is a strong chance that, although it is a paid resource, it may become your favorite. It can present images, videos (YouTube, Vimeo, HTML5 video), other HTML and there is an optional fullscreen mode.

4. Textillate.js

The plugin makes use of Animate.css + Lettering.js and it is capable of creating lots of animations like flash, bounce, shake, pulse, fade, rotate, flip and much more.

5. Lazy Line Painter

Lazy Line Painter is a pretty original jQuery plugin for preparing and presenting SVG path animations using jQuery. It works for any SVG file (any design can be exported with Illustrator in seconds) and simply by drag ‘n’ dropping it to an online generator provided by the plugin. And, after that, just insert that code into any web page and it will work.

6. Elevate Zoom

elevateZoom is a highly-customizable jQuery plugin for creating image-zoom interfaces with ease. It can work with a single high-quality image or two images (a thumb and a high-quality version).

7. Ayaslider

ayaSlider is a flexible jQuery slider plugin with a very simple usage and setup. The slider can display an unlimited number of items where any HTML can be used for the slides. It has few options to define like the easeIn/easeOut values, the delay between each slide and the prev/next selectors.

8. Chardin.js

Chardin.js is a jQuery plugin which does that in a very chic way (inspired from the recent Gmail new composer tour). It uses the information mentioned in “custom data attributes” of the given elements. And, once triggered, it activates an overlay that focuses on the element and displays the info with visual guides (that can be positioned however wanted).

9. Sidr

Sidr is a jQuery plugin for creating “hidden side menus” on-the-fly. It can be set to be displayed at right or left, a single page can have multiple side menus and offers multiple methods (existing or remote content) for loading the content. For responsive layouts, a Sidr menu can be attached to a button (that is displayed for specific screen sizes with media -queries) and it’ll be a very handy navigation solution for small screens.

10. Scroll UP

ScrollUp is a lightweight jQuery plugin to create a customisable “Scroll to top” feature that will work with any website, with ease. To create a visible line to help determine an ideal scroll distance from the top, assign a valid CSS color to the activeOverlay setting.

11. Swipebox

Swipebox is a jQuery lightbox plugin that has support for touch eventsand works well in responsive layouts. It can display a single item or a group of items (gallery) where they can be browsed with swipe gestures or keyboard too.

12. Nested

Nested is a jQuery plugin for generating multi-column grid layouts with zero gaps. The plugin creates a matrix of all elements, builds a multi column grid and tries to fill any gaps by reordering the elements. There are various other solutions out there that does the same. However, Nested applies one small action: it resizes any element at the bottom of the grid to guarantee the gap-free layout.

13. Unslider

Unslider is a tiny jQuery plugin (less than1kb minified and gzipped) for sliding any HTML content. It adapts to responsive layouts out-of-the-box and arranges itself automatically if the size of each slide is different. The slides can be browsed with the help of a bullet navigation or using keyboards.
14. Spectrum

Spectrum is a jQuery colorpicker plugin that probably comes with all the features you are looking for.
It is image-free (only CSS and JS) and can be used for all browsers or only as a polyfill for the input[type=color] of HTML5 . The picker is actually familiar to designers/developers as it is the same one that comes with WebKit DevTools (created by the same developer) but now available as a jQuery plugin.

15. Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert is a happy little jQuery plugin to hide spoilers on your site. Don’t spoil it! Hide anything with a bit of blur. Hint on mouseover. Reveal on click. To make your site spoiler free, simply include spoiler.js, then, add this somewhere: $(’spoiler, .spoiler’).spoilerAlert(). To control the maximum and partial blurs, you can pass arguments to the function. Spoiler Alert has been tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Mobile Safari.

16. Jpanel Menu

jPanelMenu is a jQuery plugin that creates a paneled-style menu like the type seen in the mobile versions of Facebook and Google, as well as in many native iPhone applications.
Animation is handled by CSS transitions, for browsers with support. CSS transitions are hardware-accelerated on supporting devices, so the animations are silky smooth.

17. Mixitup

MixItUp is a light-weight but powerful jQuery plugin that provides beautiful animated filtering and sorting of categorized and ordered content. It plays nice with your existing HTML and CSS, making it a great choice for fluid, responsive layouts. It’s perfect for portfolios, galleries, blogs, or any categorized or ordered content.

18. Magnific Popup

Magnific Popup is a free responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that is focused on performance and providing best experience for user with any device. The majority of lightbox plugins require you to define size of it via JS option.

19. Tooltipster

Tooltipster is a powerful, flexible jQuery plugin enabling you to easily create semantic, modern tooltips enhanced with the power of CSS. Tooltipster allows you to use any HTML tag you can think of inside your tooltips.

20. Menu Aim

menu-aim is a jQuery plugin for dropdown menus that can differentiate between a user trying hover over a dropdown item vs trying to navigate into a submenu’s contents. This problem is normally solved using timeouts and delays.

21. FlipClock

FlipClock.js is a jQuery plugin which replicates this effect to present anything related to time. It has support for working as a clock, countdown or timer and can be customized completely with CSS. There is an option for auto-start, multiple methods exist for controlling it (start, stop, getTime, setTime..) with their callbacks.

22. Least.js

Least.js is a jQuery-powered image gallery that can display images in a Pinterest-like layout. The images are displayed from an unordered list where their order is randomized on each load. Any clicked image doesn’t load the bigger version in a modal but by sliding other items down and the big version on the top (kind of similar to Google Image search).

23. MMenu

jQuery.mmenu is a slick plugin that brings the same behavior into any -mobile- web layout. It transforms unordered lists with unlimited sub-lists into menu items and has multiple options for customization.

24. Audio Player.js

AudioPlayer.js is a jQuery plugin for quickly placing a HTML5-powered audio player to any web page. The player’s interface is chic (doesn’t use any images for that), has a responsive layout and touch support. It has the major controls (play/pause, volume and duration) and weights only 4kb.

25. Noui Slider

It is lightweight 2.7 kb jquery Range Slider plugin which supports for single or double handles, custom starting values, vertical/horizontal orientation and the ability to get/set values. It also works with touch devices and can customized with css.

26. Windows

Windows is a lightweight jQuery plugin for nicely scrolling the full-screen. It provides a simple and handy API for managing the page/content position to ease the browsing experience.

27. jQuery Swatches

jQuery.swatches is a free to use that turns a one-line div into a sweet color swatch. You can customize the class as you want. Using different classes would allow you to render groups of swatches at individual times by calling swatchify() on a different selector.

28. Transit

Transit is a super-smooth CSS transitions & transformations for jQuery. You can make transition on any CSS property. They will happen much smoother than if you were to use jQuery’s default .animate(). You can easily translate, rotate, scale, skew and etc.

29. Progression .js

Progression.js is a jQuery plugin that gives users real time hints & progress updates as they complete forms. All you have to do is to give your form a unique ID. You then need to add a data attribute of data-progression to each element that needs to be a step in the form progression. Once you have created your form you will need to initiate the plugin.

30. jQuery Tour Bus

jQuery TourBus is a jQuery tour/walkthrough plugin. It takes more of a toolkit approach than some of the alternatives that try to have focusing elements, auto-progress with timers and indicators and etc. Start by including the jQuery plugin and base styles on your page, of course. Then we can define some ‘legs’ of our tour.

31. Pop Easy

Pop Easy is a jQuery plugin for quickly creating completely customizable modals. The plugin is lightweight (2kb) and has support for displaying any HTML element, including videos. Regarding the design, the default modal already has a good-looking interface and it can be changed/improved with CSS.

32. Smint

Smint is a jQuery plugin that can turn any given element into a sticky menu instantly. Also, the plugin has support for smooth scrolling (which is usually used in one-page websites). The plugin is almost plug ‘n’ play and the only customization provided is “scrolling speed”.

33. Fullpage.js

FullPage.js is a simple and easy to use plugin to create fullscreen scrolling websites (also known as single page websites). It allows to create fullscren scrolling websites as well as adding some landscape sliders inside the sections of the sit

34. Scrolld.js

Scrolld.js is a unique open source plugin for jQuery. Scrolld.js provides a method for highly precise scrolling for pixel-perfect layouts and navigation using real-time updated data values. With Scrolld.js your scrolling to items will always be exact and will always provide the best user experience.

35. Ferro Slider

FerroSlider is a jQuery slider for creating full-page sliders (or content/image sliders) of almost any type. The contents can be placed in a flexible way, horizontal + vertical, and the plugin will simplify browsing through them easily.

36. One Page Scroll

One Page Scroll, a jQuery plugin, simplifies creating such websites so easy. It requires minimal setup, just create your HTML structure, call the function and you are ready-to-go. Optionally, the easing function, its speed and looping behavior can be set too. And, it has support for SEO-friendly URLs for each page.

37. Wrangle

Wrangle is a responsive, touch-friendly selection plugin for jQuery or Zepto. Wrangle offers a unique method of multiple selection: by drawing a line through items to select them. It gives your app a new way to perform multiple selections: a mouse, a finger or a stylus.

38. Tidy Time

Want to display a time-based update in people-friendly language? TidyTime.js is a jQuery plugin that does just that, converting standard time formats into personable declarations of time.

39. Animate Scroll

AnimateScroll is a simple jQuery plugin for adding easing effects to scrolling. It is possible to customize the style of scrolling (30+ scrolling effects) and scroll speed. There is also a “padding” option where we can manipulate “the position where the scrolling ends”.

40. nProgress

NProgress.js is a nanoscopic progress bar. Featuring realistic trickle animations to convince your users that something is happening. It’s a slim progress bars for Ajax’y applications inspired by Google, YouTube, and Medium. It’s perfect for Turbolinks, Pjax, and other Ajax-heavy apps.

41. FlowType.js

FlowType.JS is a jQuery plugin which can auto-resize the font-size and line-height (according to the width of the element wrapping it) so that our content is displayed just as we prefer.

41. Glide.js

Glide.js is responsive and touch-friendly jQuery slider. Based on CSS3 transitions with fallback to older broswers. It’s simple, lightweight and fast. Designed to slide, no less, no more.
It works on smartphones, tablets and desktops. It supports Swipe event, Arrows and bullets navigation, Keyboard navigation, Public API with callbacks, Autoplay and Pause on hover. It is released under MIT License.

42. Intention.js

Intention.js, created by Dow Jones, is a jQuery plugin for easily developing responsive layouts. The plugin reduces the need for CSS media queries and provides a highly-flexible solution for restructuring HTML. It has 3 basic manipulations, attribution, class and placement, where they can all be set with HTML attributes.

43. Big Foot

It automatically detects the footnote link and content, turns the link into an easy-to-click button, and puts up a popover when the reader clicks on the footnote button.

44. Stickup

stickUp is a jQuery plugin, which you can implement on any webpage alongside jQuery. You can easily make any element, on any page, stick to the top of the browser window as the user scrolls past it. This feature is excellent for navigation menus, logos and/or contact information, which you may want the user to see at all times.

45. Free Wall

Freewall is a cross-browser and responsive jQuery plugin to help you create many types of grid layouts: flexible layout, images layout, nested grid, fluid grid, metro style layout, pinterest like layout with nice CSS3 animation effects and call back events.

46. Slippry

Slippry is a jQuery image gallery plugin for that has modern features. First of all, it uses HTML5-CSS3 markup and works well with responsive layouts (optional). It can be styled with Sass or CSS and has multiple transition options including Ken Burns effect.

47. SlideMe

SlideMe! is responsive, CSS3 compatible jQuery slider plugin which supports both limited or full screen views. It can be used vertically or horizontally, makes use of CSS3 transitions and has support for pagination.

48. Adaptive Background

Adaptive Backgrounds is a jQuery plugin for extracting dominant colors from images and applying it to its parent element.

49. Dynatable

Dynatable is a funner, semantic, interactive table plugin using jQuery, HTML5, and JSON. And it’s not just for tables. The purpose of Dynatable is to provide a simple, extensible API, which makes viewing and interacting with larger datasets easy.

50. jQuery Label Better

jQuery Label Better helps you label your form input like a boss with beautiful animation and without taking up space. The uniqueness about this plugin is that all you have to do is add a placeholder text, and we will show the label only when the user needs it.

51. Maplace.js

Maplace.js is a small Google Maps Javascript plugin for jQuery that helps you to embed Google Maps into your website, quickly create markers and controls menu for the locations on map. It requires jQuery and Google Maps API v3 so you need to have both in your page.

52. Auto Fix Anything

Auto Fix Anything is a little plugin will let you automatically fix position of any container on your website with one JS call. With this plugin you can dynamically fix a container within the viewport.

53. Ion.Sound

Ion.Sound is a jQuery plugin for playing sounds on events. It has been tested on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE(9.0+) and mobile browsers. Ion.Sound freely distributed under terms of MIT license.

54. jQuery Interactive 3D

jQuery Interactive 3D is a plugin that allows us to accomplish a similar functionality using multiple images. It is so easy to use and works with a simple function and a list of specifically-named images.

55. Super Simple Text Rotator

This jQuery plugin, by Pete R., makes such text-rotating so easy and fun. It works by simply storing the “to-be-rotated content” inside a span with class rotate and separating them with commas. The plugin handles the rest.

56. jQuery.Pin

jQuery.Pin makes it simple to pin text to your pages, so that it stays put as you scroll. It also works with other elements, like navigation, and can be set to stick only to certain parts of the page.

57. JInvertScroll

jInvertScroll is a jQuery plugin that manipulates the default scrolling behavior and forces a horizontal scroll. The plugin is lightweight (less than1kb) and works with almost no setup. Adding a specific class to wrapper elements and calling a JS function is enough.

58. Clndr.js

CLNDR.js is a jQuery plugin for creating calendars and customizing them however we want. The plugin doesn’t generate any markup but uses an Underscore.js HTML template to fill with data.

59. Power Ranger

Power Ranger is a lightweight jQuery plugin which helps users to resize number (ranged)inputs based on length of characters.

60. Allofthelights.js

Allofthelights.js is a jQuery plugin that can change the opacity of the whole webpage but leave the video player. This is for helping the user to easily focus on the video and there is built-in support for YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion.. and custom players can be added too.