Top Tips To Reduce Page Size and Improve Surfing Experience

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by tankard, Jul 4, 2008.

  1. #1
    I just wrote a blog about the 1&1 sitechecker tool and also added some tips on how to reduce the size of your pages for better SEO and user experience. I will drop some tips here but if you want to read the full article, please click on reduce page size.

    So here we are:

    • You would be surprised how many webmasters still use <font> tags and formating attributes for table and body tags. You can include all this in a CSS and remove the outdated tags. Also remove extensive comment tags and unused JavaScripts.
    • W3 HTML Validator service can help you with some hints. Not only it will check if you have a valid HTML but also give you ideas on where and what to delete to make the code clean.
    • Keep your CSS size down to minimum by including in the style sheet only those formating elements that are needed for YOUR site. Don't copy other webmasters' style sheets. You don't need table formating if your site doesn't use tables :D
    • Try to use relative linking (/dir/page.php) and not absolute linking (http://www.example.com/dir/page.php) if it complies with your site architecture. You cannot do it for a WP blog, for example. Extra characters mean extra size.
    • Avoid using PNG, BMP or TIF formats for your graphics. JPG is good for photos and GIF is good for graphics. Now a bit techy side of it. When you create gifs convert them to paletted bitmaps manually by selecting a relevant number of colours. Maximum is 256 but you don't need it for the web. Cutting the number of colours from 256 to 64 you can cut the size of your graphics by half!!! Just give it a try to see how many colours your pic needs to look good.

    I would love to hear your comments and maybe some more tips.
    Thank you.
     
    tankard, Jul 4, 2008 IP
  2. modern_mozart101

    modern_mozart101 Peon

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    #2
    I usually try my images in both jpg and gif and see which comes out smallest!
     
    modern_mozart101, Jul 4, 2008 IP
  3. tankard

    tankard Well-Known Member

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    #3
    That you can do, however, if it is some kind of logo or a bit of text, it sometimes gets fuzzy or the colours get flawed when converting to jpg.
     
    tankard, Jul 4, 2008 IP