Your website visitor is a very busy person. He or she cannot hang around for any number of seconds waiting for your page to appear. If you are not quick, the visitor will be gone. As crazy as this sounds, it is perfectly true. You have only a few seconds to keep the attention of the average web user and it goes without saying that you need to optimize your site so that it displays as handily as possible. Remember that some people still use dialup connections!
There are numerous ways to go about this, but to start off with you could do worse than kit yourself out with a special Firefox plug-in called YSlow. This handy little add-on is used in association with Firebug and will allow you to see the load time of your particular page. It will give your page a score and a handy analysis, to point you in the right direction.
Firstly, really scrutinize your page and make sure that everything contained therein is absolutely essential. We all like to have a visually appealing website, but is all that “flash” really necessary? Flash graphics take a long time to render and you should try and avoid embedded sound files as well.
If you are going to include multiple images, make sure that they are re-sampled and optimized for web display. It makes no sense to have a very high definition image as the file size will take a long time to open. Use online image optimizers to help you. Essentially, always include height and width tags within your image specification. If you don’t, the browser will wait before loading the image to see how it fits in within all the other content on the page.
You should try and use CSS sheets as often as possible. These essentially set a theme for a page and will greatly improve the site loading time. The browser will simply have to look for the external file for relevant styling and formatting, instead of having to interpret each tag over and over again. This makes a huge difference in the amount of HTML code for your page and consequently the amount of time the browser takes to interpret this and display it.
Tables are generally the enemy of a fast loading page. When you need to include tables, it is best to use CSS coding to create the columns on the page using the <div> tag. If not, make sure that your table does not represent the entire page, as nothing will be displayed until the entire table code has been accessed.
Artistic use of whitespace is not appropriate and you do not necessarily need line breaks between your HTML code either. Try and condense the coding as much as possible.
Remember, remove anything that you don’t absolutely need and if there is a lot of information “below the fold,” you should probably split it up into more than one page. Sometimes less is more!
What tips have you got to speed up your website?
Matthew Toren
in my area, many users are still not on broadband, and thus it is imperative that biz’s websites are optimized for low bandwidth users. I reckon that at least half of all users do not bother to wait for a website to load if they have to wait for more than 1 min.
In particular, i do have issues with websites that are heavily using adobe flash.
Great tips. Most don’t realize that there are a lot of people still not using broadband and people don’t have the patience to wait around for your site to load.
After reading this, I might have to learn html.