Speed is certainly one of the most important factors when it comes to making a successful web site. These days’ people have high expectations, they expect a web site to load as fast as an application on their operating system, and therefore even a few seconds of waiting can frustrate them or leave altogether. A good website should take about 8-12 seconds (for a 56K) to load. The website owner is going to have to decide how fast its pages are going to be, for example for a multimedia or a flash site they can afford to be a bit slower than others provided that the users know the nature of the site. If you're curious as to how fast you're website is here are two websites that checks your speed: http://www.vertain.com/?sst http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ Ways to speed up your website HTML issues: - Use CSS where possible: Because pages with stylesheets load faster than those web sites designed with font tags and tables, and also it's much faster and easier to make changes. (Some resources on CSS – http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp, http://www.websitetips.com/css/, and http://www.glish.com/css/) - Stay clear of nested tables: Nested tables are basically tables within tables, but too many of theses can really slow down the browser. When a page loads the browser starts from the top and goes down in a consecutive manner, with nested tables it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing. - Specifying height and width: For tables and images it's a good idea to specify their height and width, as it helps out the browser and therefore speeds up the process.
Another very important think is to optimize your images, trying to have a good quality per size ratio. Best Regards Adrian
Page size: - Reduce the number of images where possible: Most common causes of slow web pages are images, but they are also the easiest to fix. Try to eliminate repeat and unnecessary images, so they are not downloaded the second time. And also try not to use images for words, unless it's absolutely necessary reason being the download time and also they can't be searched. - Reduce the size of images: Everybody uses different techniques (e.g. converting to JPEG), but as long as the images are compressed it's beneficial for everyone. - Remove unnecessary multimedia: This includes video, audio, flash and animation, if it isn't important then it shouldn't be on the page. - Remove unnecessary scripts: Some codes can slow down the site, consider evaluating the codes and making them better if possible. - Remove unnecessary META tags and META content: META tags don't achieve very much anymore, people used them for search engine optimization but due to misuse they don't hold much importance in SEO.
Interesting, will try these thanks. For optimizing picture I use Fotocanvas from ACDSee, quality is good. But I think most poeple use Photoshop.. a bit complicated for me..
how do you optimize (reduce image size retain quality) using Fotocanvas from ACDSee. Is there a tutorial somewhere?
It also depends on the host and wheather ther host overloads the servers, at 3dgamics.com/store we dont so its guranteed speed.
Photoshop or any other program what know to change color type of the picture... If you have a picture with no more than 256 colors try to use web optimized palete ... Regards
Web host: - Bandwidth: Make sure you have enough bandwidth allocated, it's a good idea to attain more bandwidth then needed just in case of a sudden rise in traffic. - Capacity of severs: There's a limit as to how many people can access your website so once again if your web site is growing in traffic, you should consider upgrading your service. These are just some of the basics to speed up your website, there are many other ways you can reduce download time for your website. If you have any other tips please feel free to post.
Most of my sites are intolerably slow, but I've come to grips with it, because of the content I supply takes time to load. I'm sure I lose potential visitors, but according to site stats, 80% of my visitors are on broadband... Anyways, my thinking is that, if your site has content to justify the slow load time, people are more willing to swallow the slight wait.
If you hosting on windows you can enable http compression for your website. Makes a page load about 3-5 times faster. If you don't have access to the server you can compress html with this tool: http://www.freesoft.fsnet.co.uk/html01.htm What this tool does is cleaning up white space and unecessary html markup. My homepage for example : www.truelending.com loads in less than 2 seconds using both options.
Exactley, if it's made clear to the user what kind of a website it is like for example a Flash Media one then they would usually understand and wait.
If you want to speed up your website I would recommend... 1.) Removing all whitespace (this includes returns, tabs, spaces, etc.). There are automated tools that can do this for you (try searching for httpZip or HTMLCompact on Google). This can usually reduce the size of your page by about 10-20%. 2.) I would also recommend using PHP and something called ob_gzhandler. You use it like this... <?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?> You put that at the very top of your PHP page and it compresses your entire page using gzip compression. It can usually shrink a 60kb page to around 7-8kb (but only if the browser viewing the page supports gzip decoding). If the browser doesn't support gzip decoding, it simply sends the full page instead. You can learn more by searching for ob_gzhandler in Google.