It’s the day and age when speed matters, in more ways than one. Life is running along at a pace that’s racing – no one is willing to walk when they can run. So when it comes to the information highway we call the Internet, people expect things to happen in the blink of an eye. They’re not willing to wait around forever for your site to load, not when numerous other pages offer similar content at a faster rate. Even if they’re regular visitors who show you some amount of loyalty, they’re bound to turn traitors when your pages are always slow to load. And who can blame them for that? What you can do is make sure your page loads as soon as possible, even if your viewer is on a slow dial up connection. And for this, you must:

    * Minimize the number of pictures and videos on your site. Use images and animation only when they’re absolutely relevant to the content and theme of your website.
    * Go for optimized .png files when you use images on your page rather than the .gif or .jpg formats. If you’re forced to use .gif or .jpg files, use the former when resolution doesn’t matter and the latter when it does, like when you’re using photographs.
    * If you must use pictures, make use of the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes as well so that the browser knows how much space to allocate for your graphics and continue loading the rest of the page. Without these attributes, your entire page has to wait for the graphic to be loaded before the rest of the contents can be displayed.
    * Use pictures that are small in size, but even then, don’t go overboard. For each separate file you use on your page, it sends separate HTTP requests to your server, thus slowing down your overall load time.
    * Try not to put your entire page within a table because the webpage loads only after the full table loads. So your reader gets to see a blank page for a long time, especially if they’re on a slow connection. If you must use a table, break it up into two separate tables, with the first displaying the table header and a few links – this will buy you some time while the rest of the page loads so that your visitor is not driven to close your page on seeing it blank.
    * Remove empty tags and whitespaces – this speeds up your page quite a bit and also keeps your code clean.
    * If the information you have on one page is too long, split the contents over two separate pages rather than have your visitors wait for the entire page to load and then scroll down to read the text.
    * Don’t put stuff that’s not needed or relevant on your pages – fancy graphics and media files (audio and video) may seem like good ideas when you think about them, but when implemented, they slow down your page and are more of a nuisance than you realize.
    * Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) when writing your code to speed up page load times.

 

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