Web page loading time is one of the critical challenges on the Internet. This topic attracts more researchers as it largely reflects the user satisfaction. A web page resources typically consists of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style-Sheet (CSS), JavaScript (JS), media files, etc. As the complexity of the web page increases, the size of files fetched from server also increases which causes delay in transmitting, loading, parsing and rendering the web page. The web page is not rendered until HTML, CSS and JS files are loaded and parsed. Not all such files are needed to be rendered for the first page. Optimizing and loading only critical les required for the first page, can considerably reduce time taken to load the web page. After the first page is rendered, the rest of the files can be loaded and executed. In this thesis, we focus on improving the time taken for First Meaningful Paint(FMP) of website by loading the critical files initially. We used Design Science Research( DSR) methodology and created a PhantomJS application, to identify and segregate used and unused CSS for the first meaningful paint of the web page. We also analyzed script files to load only critical files required for FMP and the rest later. We evaluated our experiment by studying a case on Axis Communications AB and measured its website's performance to find if our experiment reduced FMP time. It showed improvement in time taken for FMP from 1284ms to 372.6ms. Based on the results, we suggest to web developers to separate and load the files required for FMP and load the rest of the files needed for the website later, so that the first page is rendered quickly.

According to the HTTP Archive, 75% of websites are using web fonts. Multiple conditions have to be met before modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari decide to download the web fonts needed on a page. As a result, web fonts are late discovered resources that can delay the First Meaningful Paint (FMP). Improving the FMP is relevant for the web industry, particularly for performance-conscious web developers. This paper gives insight into how the resource prioritization approaches HTTP/2 Preload and HTTP/2 Server Push can be used to optimize the delivery of web fonts for first-time visitors. Five font loading strategies that use HTTP/2 Server Push and/or Preload were implemented on replicas of the landing pages from five real-world websites. The font loading strategies were evaluated against each other, and against the non-optimized version of each landing page. All the evaluated font loading strategies in this degree project improved the time it took to deliver the first web font content to the user’s screen, resulting in a faster FMP. It was also discovered that HTTP/2 Server Push, on its own, is not a more performance efficient resource prioritization approach than HTTP/2 Preload when it comes to delivering web font content to the client. Further, HTTP/2 Server Push and HTTP/2 Preload appears to be more efficient when used together, in the context of optimizing the delivery of web font content. However, all conclusions in this paper are based on the results gathered from testing the font loading strategies in an emulated environment and are yet to be confirmed on actual mobile devices with real network conditions.