Getting Your Site To Load Faster

Often, the most frustrating thing to encounter when browsing in the net is when you encounter a site that takes more than a minute to load. Usually, the user gets so irritated about the loading time that he just leave the site and go to another one. This can also be a problem to the site owner himself as potential traffic will be easily lost.

So, when putting up a site, it would be best if you design your site in such a way that it loads much faster. Of course, you still need to think about the connection that most of your would be audience actually have. And so, here are some useful ways that you can do to help improve your loading time.

Your biggest concern here is content. The more content that a page has, the longer it will load. But with all the content heavy demands made by users nowadays, the solution here isn't as easy as simply deleting the contents. However, you can organize your content such that they occupy smaller file spaces while still maintaining their quality.

Images, in particular, can greatly affect loading time. One of the easiest remedy to increase the speed at which a page loads is by using smaller images. If you need to show the full sized image, you can put in on a separate blank page and use the smaller image that you put on your main page as a thumbnail to link to it. On the other hand, if you do need to show the full sized one on your main page, you can compress it to a lower quality one for faster loading. An image with a 60% resolution is as good as a full resolution one on the web.

You also need to watch out for flash contents. Flash is definitely good if you want to add multimedia content to your page. However, they can surely slow your download times a lot. Here's a useful tip, choose flash contents that don't activate unless they are clicked upon, YouTube videos are a good example of this. Since they only run when the user requests so, the browser only needs to load the initial parts of the flash item, which reduces the time the page needs to be displayed.

Cleaning up your website's code can also be helpful to speed up your loading time. Inspect your HTML codes and remove any unnecessary pieces. For example, instead of having to format each and every paragraph using a separate tag, you can simply enclose everything in a single tag and use the dominant format. You can then apply individual tags to those sections that require different formatting.

To make everything easier, you can write the general format and layout of your site in an external CSS file. The browser will only need to load the external file once and will just read through it for the rest of the pages. This will make your pages load faster, since the actual content is the only one needed to be retrieved and the layout be read from the CSS file. This technique is also very useful for recurring codes like Javascript.