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Speed Up Your Web Site

Speed is one of the most important factors for a successful web site. In this day and age, people have high expectations. They demand that a web site load fast. If they have to wait more than a few seconds, they either get frustrated or they leave. 8-12 seconds (56K) is a good load time.

So how do you speed your web site up? One way is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) wherever possible. Pages with stylesheets load faster than straight HTML sites using font tags and tables. With CSS you also get the added advantage of being able to make changes faster and easier.

Another good way to speed up your web site is to avoid using nested tables wherever possible. If you don't know, nested tables are tables within tables. Too many of these and you'll see a noticable slow down with your browser.

A third way of speeding up your web site is to specify the height and width for your tables and images. This will really help the browser out.

Number 4 on our reducing download time hit parade is to reduce the number of images you're using wherever possible. Images are the most common cause of slow web pages. Try to avoid using images for words unless you absolutely have to. It slows the download time and spiders can't read them.

Reduce the size of the images you have to use. Convert them to JPEG if they're not already in that format.

Reduce all unnecessary multimedia. Get rid of the video, audio, flash and animation unless it's absolutely necessary. Quit using it to show off. You aren't showing off to people who aren't waiting around for the damn page to load.

Remove unnecessary scripts. Some script codes can slow down a site.

Make sure you're getting enough bandwidth from your hosting company. It's a good idea to have a little more than you need in case you have a sudden rise in traffic. If your web site in getting close to it's limit, the speed of your web site can decrease significantly.