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How to Make Your Website Load Faster
So your web pages have great content, a nice design, but hardly
anyone seems to click through from them to any other part of
your website. In many cases, the problem is the load time -
people are abandoning your site for the simple reason that it
just takes too long for the thing to load.
How Fast Does It Need to Be?
Fast load times are extremely important: usability studies say
users rate them as one of the most important things about a
website. Users would much rather use a quick-loading site of
average quality than a great one that loads sluggishly - no
doubt you've done this yourself at some point.
What's the limit? Well, studies say that over a third of users
will leave a website that doesn't load within ten seconds. You
might think that, in the age of broadband, download speeds don't
matter, but remember that in the US, over half of all Internet
users are still using slow dial-up connections (if you are, you
have my sympathy). Other countries don't tend to have quite as
many dial-up connections left, but broadband penetration is
certainly nowhere near universal.
This means that you need to pay attention to the size and
download speed of your site: those 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up
connection correspond to about 70KB in page size - that means
that your HTML and graphics should add up to 70KB as an absolute
limit. That's quite a stringent requirement, and makes every
byte count.
Reduce Graphics
The first thing you should do, then, is to keep the number of
graphics your website uses to a minimum. Don't have graphics for
things where text or CSS would do, or where they don't enhance
your information or design significantly. You should consider
the web to be a text medium, and justify every graphic you use
to yourself.
Compress Your Graphics
Once you've removed the un-needed graphics, you might consider
compressing the ones that remain. Try turning up their JPEG
compression higher, or reducing the number of colours used - you
might try using a GIF, if your graphics don't have very many
different
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colours.
When you can't compress your graphics any smaller, don't miss
more traditional steps: you could always resize your graphics to
make them smaller!
Clean Up Your HTML
You'd be surprised just how bloated HTML code can get with
unnecessary tags, especially if you use a WYSIWYG editor, or
design your site using tables. Design your site using CSS as
much as you can, and use HTML Tidy (or another HTML cleaning
program) to clean up your HTML. Don't ignore the extra bandwidth
taken by CSS, though, and try to keep that as small as possible
too.
In many cases, a simple cleaning-up process can reduce the
download size by your pages by as much as half - it's especially
effective for pages that contain long articles, because of the
number of unnecessary tags many editors insert at the start of
new paragraphs.
Switch Web Hosts
Finally, you might find that, despite your website's small
download size, it still loads slowly. In these cases, your web
host may be to blame. Test from a few different connections and
computers to make sure, and try putting up a completely
different page to test the speeds - but if it's consistently
bad, then it may be time to move hosts. You should, however,
email your host about the problem first and give them a week or
so to fix it, as they may just be having short-term problems.
When you're switching to a host to try to get a good speed, you
might want to consider looking around at sites that are already
hosted by them. The best way to do this is to do a search for
"hosted by [host's name]" (with the quote marks), as many sites
will write who they're hosted by on one of their pages - you can
then check a few sites out to see whether they're generally fast
or slow.
About the author:
Original Source: Eclipse-Articles.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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