How to Speed Up Page Load Time

Although thousands of new people gain access to the Internet every day, you should know that many are still on dial up. Therefore, you should show a little empathy for these poor souls by doing a few simple things to make your pages load faster. Making your pages load faster will also keep your bandwidth charges to a minimum and your users happy.

1.) Styling your website using CSS allows the use of an external file that will help your pages load much quicker. This streamlines your coding compelling a web browser to cache all the formatting information instead if reading tags on every page. Generally speaking, CSS will handily speed up page loading even when switching older designs from HTML-only to a combination of external cascading style sheets and inline tagging.

2.) Use of external scripting will do the same chore as it will with CSS. This is especially true when using the very same script on several pages within your site. Referencing Java scripts from an external source instead of incorporating the code on every page will allow the browser to cache the script and save a lot of time specifically when using very large scripts.

3.) You may be quite the knowledgeable designer but you should avoid trying to show off using every single tool in your webmaster kit. Although embedded sound, video and flash elements may look cool and impressive, why are you placing all of these elements on a single page?

4.) The “survey” says that most embedded sound files are found to be annoying to most people. Think about all those people peeking at the Internet while at work. The unknown sound that suddenly rings out through the workroom will alert everyone that someone is surfing the net.

5.) Also, many people actually ear plug up listening to music when your annoying sounds come over the computer’s speakers. Forget Java Applets; use Java Script because it loads faster. Unless all the fancy effects are actually part of the solution you are offering visitors to your site, take a far better critical look at them determining if they are really necessary.

6.) Another design method that tends to slow things down is nesting tables – putting one inside the other. If at all possible, try using CSS to create columns for your well-designed site instead of using tables. Your browser is going to take a little bit of time to work out the tables facing when you put one inside the other using strictly HTML coding.

7.) Another great tip is to avoid using full-page tables. The little page loading will keep spinning and spinning and spinning since it will take the browser quite a deal of time to read the entire code for the stable. Instead, you can try to use multiple tables that are not asked, or place regular content above the first table appearance that will get the page loading quicker. This may just be a little bit of an illusionary trick since the page is probably not loading faster, but you visitor thinks it is doing so.

8.) Design your pages to a minimum length. This not only will help to make your pages load quicker, but you will stop annoying your visitors to have to teach growing on and on and on to read the information you’re presenting. It is a given that people have limited attention spans, so try not to abuse them.

9.) Whenever you do hand coding, always edit for all the whitespace. The whitespace is that empty area between your code where you can remove any unneeded tabs or spaces. This will help immensely. Not only will this take out a lot of those unnecessary bytes that make up your page size, it will also go a long way to speed up how well the page will load.

Also, if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, when you finished coding a page, you need to go back and remove all those excess and empty tags that this type of editor produces.

10.) Make use of image optimizers that can help reduce file size as well as employing one of several page load testers like Pingdom, WebPageTest.org or the Google tool, Page Speed. These online tools and plug-ins can help you identify objects and areas of your pages that are slowing down and thus help you correct the problem. Page Speed will also test your server checking out how its configuration affects the loading of your pages making suggestions on how to improve it.