Website Optimization: Tips to Optimize Your Pages for Faster Loading and Response Time

These are some of the most effective and proven to work tips to increase the page load time of your website. You must try these not only to dramatically increase the page load time but also to achieve better visitor satisfaction. Would you go back to a site which does not load on time?

1. Optimize the Images - Many of us, including myself, use images to enhance the content and sometimes it’s imperative for publishers like us to put images in our pages for more clarity on the subject. While some of us know that it’s better to embed images which are relatively smaller in size for faster loading of pages, some of us do not pay attention to it. You must know that the faster the pages load, the chances of someone waiting for your entire page to show up increases. It’s also advisable to not to put images on the top of the pages but anywhere after at least one para of content [not a rule though]. This will ensure that even if your images are taking time to load, the user will at least see the first block of content and might wait for the rest of the page to load. Some online services to optimize your graphics are:- and . [Gifworks] and [Spinwave]. Gifworks will help you optimize only GIF images while Spinwave can optimize both JPEG and GIF.

2. Prefer External Scripting - It’s a common practice to use CSS and Javascript in your website for achieving many creative things. But do you put the CSS and Javascript code in your pages? That’s not good. You must include those files in your pages rather than putting them in each and every page of your site. Going external with CSS and Javascript will bring down the size of the pages to a great extent.

To include the CSS file in your HTML, you can use the following:-
<link rel=stylesheet type=”text/css” href=”StyleSheey.css”>
and to include a .js file you can use
<script src=”Filename.js” language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>
</script>
[Note: You can attach more than one CSS or Javascript includes in the HEAD section of your HTML].

The advantage of doing this is that when search engine spiders crawl your pages, they will not see CSS or Javascript code but straight away read your site’s content. This is a major plus for your site’s Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

3. Avoid External Images - If you are linking to images from other site then the page load time will directly depend on the speed at which the images are loaded from the external sites. If the external site is down then the images on your site will not load up at all and may also affect the page load time of your site. The best way around this is to upload all those images in a folder on your site and then embed them in your HTML pages. This will increase the page load time to a great extent. Some examples of most common images are from Digg, Online photo sharing services etc.

4. Optimize your scripting - Most of us use some or the other server side scripting language for processing pages and if the code is not well written, it may adversely affect the performance of your web server and also reduce the page load time. My advise to you is to revisit the code if the above 3 points fail to increase your page load time.

Other noteworthy factors that affect your site’s performance are - the load on the server on which your site is hosted, bandwidth available for the server and other hardware factors.

If you have any suggestions/comments to add, please feel free to post them through our comments form.

Related External Links:
[Akamai's 4 Seconds Research]