What to do to make the site faster?

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by Yigal6, Sep 3, 2007.

  1. #1
    Hello guys.
    When I compare the speed of my website to some of my competitors I noticed that my site is 4-5 times slower in loading. What can I do to increase the loading speed? I use mostly gif files to display pictures on my homepage.
    I also checked some of the sites that use the same server and they are still much faster.
    Here is a result I get: (my website is the first in the list)
    http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test?...asures.com http://www.jewelryshopping.com/
    Will appreciate your opinion.
     
    Yigal6, Sep 3, 2007 IP
  2. klown

    klown Peon

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    #2
    Your home page loaded pretty quick for me. The internal pages could be sped up quite a bit by reducing picture size. 38 kb per picture with 12 pictures equals about half a mb of stuff to download.

    To really increase your site's speed redo the entire site's structure so it uses css. This will greatly lessen the amount of code which needs to load on each page.
     
    klown, Sep 3, 2007 IP
  3. Dark Rider

    Dark Rider Guest

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    #3
    seems like their servers are faster then yours, some of them anyways. other then that you can try optimizing your images a bit. most of them are small but some could be smaller i think. the one with all the paypal stuff in your footer is 41kb which isnt much but that would slow down the load time a little. and some of your navigation buttons are around 10kb could be more like 8kb probably and then your check mark images are about 8kb and maybe could be 4 or 5kb. if you have photoshop changing these will be real easy. other then that you would just need a faster server I guess.
     
    Dark Rider, Sep 3, 2007 IP
  4. AstarothSolutions

    AstarothSolutions Peon

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    #4
    Your images are very big.

    Dont be mistaken into thinking that GIF are actually automatically smaller than JPG as they aren't. The two file types use a different method of defining the colour for each pixel and one or the other typically works best in a given situation.

    Take for example wedpopyopy.gif, it is currently 48KB but by saving it as a jpg it is down to 26.7KB - if you convert from the original file you can probably get it lower as the gif formating has already created colour banding that playing with the jpg worsens at a lower file size
     
    AstarothSolutions, Sep 4, 2007 IP
  5. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #5
    You should also be aware that iwebtool does NOT include images set via CSS in it's figures - take belljewels.com for example.

    iWebTools reports:
    01 belljewels.com 34.24 KB 2.01 seconds 0.06 seconds


    While the document size report from the information tab in FF reports:
    Documents (1 file)	34 KB
    	http://belljewels.com/	34 KB
    	Images (34 files)	312 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/wedpopyopy.gif	48 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/imgecheck.jpg	42 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/134pw.jpg	37 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/menu.jpg	19 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/back_men.jpg	18 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/sec08.jpg	15 KB
    	http://www.pbase.com/image/83473446.jpg	12 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/untitlh-copy.gif	12 KB
    	http://www.pbase.com/yigal6/image/82487931.jpg	11 KB
    	http://www.pbase.com/image/83473553.jpg	11 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/hhjy-copy-copy-copy.gif	10 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/hddg%20copy.gif	9 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/im09%20copy.gif	8 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/im81%20copy.gif	8 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/img6_copy.gif	8 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/untitlcopy.gif	7 KB
    	http://www.pbase.com/image/83451873.jpg	6 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/imopy%20copy.gif	6 KB
    	http://www.benchmarkemail.com/images/icons/1_2.gif	5 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/photograph_copy_copy.gif	4 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/ucopy.gif	3 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/img_3526g.gif	3 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/black%20diamond%20jewelry.gif	2 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/untitled-2.gif	2 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/gemstone%20rings.gif	2 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/necklaces.gif	2 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/earrings.gif	1 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/fedex.gif	513 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/buttonright.gif	134 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/button.gif	130 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/hbar.gif	107 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/button_f3.gif	100 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/hbar_f2.gif	58 bytes
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/clear.gif	44 bytes
    	Objects (0 files)	
    	Scripts (1 file)	3 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/script.js	3 KB
    	Style Sheets (2 files)	18 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/style.css	14 KB
    	http://www.belljewels.com/templates/89312/menu-ns.css	4 KB
    	Total	367 KB
    Code (markup):
    367k, 312 of that being your images.

    Though frankly, render time is going to be a stone cold pig because you've got at least three times the html for that page as should be needed, much less the 18k of style sheets in two files doing the job of 10k with one sheet.

    Being that you appear to be relying on a faulty .js menu that doesn't work right in Opera or Safari could also be a contributing factor...

    Though the biggest problem is just the glut of code.

    <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
    text="#999999"
    link="#999999"
    alink="#999999"
    vlink="#999999"
    marginwidth="0"
    marginheight="0"
    onload="initialiseMenu();"
    leftmargin="0"
    rightmargin="0"
    topmargin="0"
    bottommargin="0">

    Should be in your CSS so it's cached across subpages.

    	<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">
    	<!--
    	if (document.images)
    	{
      		pic1= new Image(150,18); 
      		pic1.src="templates/89312/button.gif"; 
    
      		pic2= new Image(150,18); 
      		pic2.src="templates/89312/button_f2.gif"; 
    
      		pic3= new Image(150,18); 
      		pic3.src="templates/89312/buttonright.gif"; 
    
      		pic4= new Image(150,18); 
      		pic4.src="templates/89312/buttonright_f2.gif"; 
    
      		pic5= new Image(150,18); 
      		pic5.src="templates/89312/button_f3.gif"; 
    
    	}
    	//-->
    Code (markup):
    Not even sure I want to know what that's there to accomplish

    You've got an imagemap for what could easily be text content, another imagemap that should likely be a string of LI's with image sliding, (and again would probably be better off as text over a image background)...

    <table width="780" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center">
      <tr> 
        <td colspan="8" height="2"></td>
      </tr>
      <tr> 
        <td height="1" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"></td>
        <td colspan="2" height="1" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"></td>
        <td height="1"></td>
        <td colspan="3" height="1" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"></td>
        <td height="1" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"></td>
      </tr>
    Code (markup):
    Dude - seriously... waste of code for what could be done with a simple margin-top:2px; border-top:1px solid #CCC; on the table... and the inlined properties of the table could all be deleted.

    This 'hasnomenu', 'hassubmenu' nonsense seriously needs the axe - I'd probably axe the titles since they are ignored by search engines and if your content text doesn't describe the item well enough - you're using the wrong text... and all those noBR should get the axe, instead just set all LI under #mainmenu to white-space:nowrap;

    and WHAT is with this nonsense of detecting IE via javascript to add a font tag wrapping a BR?!?

    Worse, you've got whole sections of invalid code like:

    <TABLE borderColor=#d3d3d3 cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=4 width=599 align=center bgColor=#ffffff border=0>
    <P>
    <CENTER>

    I could probably recode that site and your other sites to half or even a third their current sizes on code alone - BEFORE we even get into the subject of image optimization (which is also sorely lacking).

    Remember, valid minimal markup - then bend it to your will via CSS... that philosophy would go a LONG ways here.
     
    deathshadow, Sep 4, 2007 IP
  6. webdesigner

    webdesigner Well-Known Member

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    #6
    deathshadow has the right idea. Start from scratch...
     
    webdesigner, Sep 4, 2007 IP
  7. wais

    wais Guest

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    #7
    Actually the pictures can cause on a page or website to make it slow so the problem of the borther that is all because of the server or domain you have joined that shall cause your website to open slowly when i checked your website it opened as i am checking the other websites no Diffrence..
    The cause, is you have to tell your administrator to Clean the cache of the server or try to glance on the other specific materials to present the fast speed. this was my simple opinion:confused:
     
    wais, Sep 4, 2007 IP
  8. Yigal6

    Yigal6 Active Member

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    #8
    Thank you guys for your input.
    I'll try to fix these issues.
    Yigal.
     
    Yigal6, Sep 4, 2007 IP