Does the location of the HTML title tag affect load time?

Question

If I put the title at the top of the head, will it show (noticeably) sooner than if I put it after stylesheets or scripts?

Answer 1

dhvrm got it right...the only real performance monsters are frames (long ago deprecated), Java applets, images, and embedded objects such as inline movies, audio files and the like. Focus your attention on well-formed and validated HTML/XHTML markup and you will be fine. Good luck.

Answer 2

Depends on how much data you have in the stylesheets and scripts and how fast is the connection between your server and the person viewing the page.  Put a lot of code up front and connect with a 300 baud modem (old school!!!) and yeah you'll have some wait time.  In most cases people connect with at least a 56k modem these days so the delay will be negligable.

Answer 3

Provided the TITLE tag is properly nested within the HEAD and HTML tags, its relative position within HEAD will not affect load time.

As a rule, most browsers don't suffer performance issues based on the order of tags in valid documents. That's not entirely true -- depending on the browser, the availability of of LINK and SCRIPT source documents, for example, can impact load time -- but it's generally true.

Even in poorly formed documents, provided the document has a common document object model, such as HTML / XHTML, elements that are entirely internal to the document aren't going to significantly slow down a browser's performance.