Your website visitor is a very busy person. They’re not going to wait around for your page to load. If you are not quick, the visitor will be gone. As outlandish as this may seem, it’s entirely accurate. You have only a few seconds to keep the attention of the average web user and it goes without saying that you need to optimize your site so that it displays as handily as possible. Remember that some people still use dial-up connections!
There are a variety of ways to go about this, but to begin with you should get a special Firefox plug-in called YSlow. This useful add-on is utilised in association with Firebug, and it will let you to see the load time of any particular page you’d like to check. It will provide you with a detailed score and a rather handy analysis, to give you some pointers in the right direction.
To start off with, it’s a good idea to really scrutinize your page and do your best to ensure that every detail is absolutely essential for your purpose. Most of us like to look at visually stimulating websites, but is all that “flash” really necessary? Gernerally, flash graphics take a long time to render and you should try and avoid embedded sound files as well.
If you are going to include multiple images, make sure that they are re-sampled and optimized for web display. It makes no sense to have a very high definition image as the file size will take a long time to open. Use online image optimizers to help you. Essentially, always include height and width tags within your image specification. If you don’t, the browser will wait before loading the image to see how it fits in within all the other content on the page.
You should try and use CSS sheets as often as possible. These essentially set a theme for a page and will greatly improve the site loading time. The browser will simply have to look for the external file for relevant styling and formatting, instead of having to interpret each tag over and over again. This makes a huge difference in the amount of HTML code for your page and consequently the amount of time the browser takes to interpret this and display it.
Tables are generally the enemy of a fast loading page. When you need to include tables, it is best to use CSS coding to create the columns on the page using the
Artistic use of whitespace is not appropriate and you do not necessarily need line breaks between your HTML code either. Try and condense the coding as much as possible.
Remember, remove anything that you don’t absolutely need and if there is a lot of information “below the fold,” you should probably split it up into more than one page. Sometimes less is more!
Adam Toren, Co-Founder of Young Entrepreneur, specializes in developing the profitability of struggling businesses with a specialised and ‘bottom line’ approach. Adam, along with his brother, have created, purchased and sold a variety of companies over the years. At the moment, they own and manage a highly successful publishing company and several dedicated online enterprises.
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