You may not realize this, but if your site currently loads up slowly then you will be throwing away a large amount of money and literally turning away customers at your door. The web is a fast paced environment and people use the internet because they expect to get the information they want quickly and without having to wait. Thus if your website currently takes over a minute to load ten a lot of people are going to decide to simply leave it and go elsewhere. Potentially, this could also affect your ranking in Google as the algorithm starts to look at factors such as how long someone spends on a website – which will be very brief if they decide to leave before it’s even loaded.
Think your website loads perfectly quickly enough? Well there’s a chance that even if that’s true on your computer, that it isn’t going to load quickly on a phone or slower connection and that’s something you need to check as well.
In general it’s just safest to make sure you follow the best practices when building your website if you want to hang on to as much of your traffic as possible, and if this isn’t something you’ve considered up until this point – well then your site is probably suffering and it’s time to get considering.
Some Tips for Faster Loading
Smaller Files
Of course the most obvious thing to do here is to make your files as small as possible In other words if you have a huge background image that’s over a megabyte large, then you might want to consider reducing the quality or converting the format so that it’s smaller and thus quicker to load. Alternatively you might want to consider rethinking your design altogether so that you can use a repeating image in the background instead.
Resize Your Images the Proper Way
Another thing to bear in mind is that if you are loading a large image and then changing the attributes in your HTML you are wasting a lot of time by loading that large image and then converting it. Much better is to create various smaller images and thumbnails in Paint by actually reducing the size of the image so that the browsers aren’t reading more information than they need to.
Learn Ajax
Ajax is a coding style that allows web designers to choose the elements of their web page which load up firs and to asynchronously load elements at any time. For instance this allows us to load only thumbnails of an image until a user requests to see the full thing, and it allows us to load things like images last after everything else is displaying.
Use External Files
If your design is consistent throughout your site then you should use an external CSS file rather than using in-line CSS. Likewise if you have the same menu or the same paragraph at the top or bottom of every page then you can use the ‘include’ command to have keep this in an external file too. That way the visitors’ computers will store the file in the cache so that they don’t need to reload it for each new page. It’s also good practice anyway as it makes editing the style and layout of your pages much faster.
Refactor Your Code
Refactoring is a coding term that basically means rewriting code to do the same thing. If your pages are filled with unnecessary junkand tags and if things could be done in a more elegant way, then this will slow down the loading speed of your site and it’s worthwhile going through with a fine comb to optimize it.
Consider the Order
You should also bear in mind the order of your HTML and other code. Note that browsers read pages from the top to the bottom in a linear fashion except where instructed to do otherwise. This then means that if you want something to load up first you should generally put it at the top of the page rather than the bottom. As a rule slower things should go at the bottom then and that means Javascript and large images (though this will affect the position of the images as well).
Hi, I am John Russell and I have always believed that slow loading websites can put visitors off. A good hosting company can also help you in get a faster loading website. I kept that in mind when I prepared my fatcow review page.
Photo by themonnie
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