Slow loading website are most certainly a dying breed. If your website takes more than ten seconds to load, you might as well have a giant website under construction image up as well. Doing my analyses, I found the average home page load is usually between 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. If you want anybody looking at your website, it’s time to speed that load time up. This week I will be posting several tips on how to do just that, starting with some basics today.
Why Speed Matters Even More Now
The reason I say these slow loading websites are a dying breed is because of a few reasons. Hardware and bandwidth is faster, web users expect it, and now search engines are beginning to expect it. That last part is a big one, because you will always be able to build a super slow loading website with a thousand pictures on it if you wanted, and in the past, search engines would still try to index it for results. That scenario may soon become a thing of the past though, and your sites load time is more important than ever.
Over the past couple of weeks there have been several reports that Google has had it with slow loading websites. There are just too many websites out there to be stuck indexing sloppy (poor code), fat (too much on one page), and slow loading websites. If you want people who use Google to find your website, it’s time to start optimizing for speed. Side note here, this is an great extra benefit for users too.
Today’s Simple Tips for Speeding Up Your Website
Over the course of this week I will be writing about several ways that you can speed up your website. Some will benefit users, some will benefit robots scanning your content, and some will do both.
To speed up a website load time for you users you need to understand a basic concept. The users browser essentially reads your code, and then draws your website onto their computer based on their screen settings. Here are some ways to make the “drawing” finish quicker.
- Compact your code removing line spaces, and excessive remarks – This will make reduce the time to read the code.
- Compress images and other forms of media – The less time it takes to download the image, the faster it will be loaded onto the users PC.
- Use image attributes to specify width and height – When the browser reads a site without these attributes it is then forced to get this information from the file itself, and cannot even begin drawing the page correctly until the image and its information has been loaded.
- Simply limiting content per page
- Validating your code – Validating your code has several benefits, and in this particular case can benefit both search indexing, and users experience. When there are errors in code, browsers and bots will both try to self correct. This means more processing time, a.k.a. longer load time.
- Host your CSS and javascript in separate files – By having all of your styles defined in a CSS file, and/or all of your javascript in a separate file will have huge benefits for users that visit more than one page. Those files become cached after the first page, and no longer require downloading when the user visits other pages on your site.
Tomorrow I will be going over some of the suggestions Google is making, and getting that site optimized for it.
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Sometimes it depends on the design of the website if it has too many effects on it it will surely affect the loading of the website… the less or simple design websites normally loads fast.
Well the speed of the website does really matter.. NO one like to wait for longer time especially waiting for the page to load even if person has a lot of free time. It has just become the mindset of the customer that with the increasing awareness and speed of internet information much be available as soon as the thought arises. Thus in order to hold on your client and make some business it is necessary to ave a right balance of information , graphics and speed to make the best out of it.
I think speed is quiet and important factor. But quality of content and right balance between text images and ads is very important. If one achieves this balance then its easy enough to attain the speed factor.
I totally agree with your point on keeping the CSS & Java separate. I did this recently with two of my sites and it made them load about 10-20% faster – even on IE as well as Firefox which surprised me as I’d always had problems with IE before. Thanks.
Nice new tool in webmaster tools in google.. lets you calculate your loading times and also gives suggestions as to how you can fix your page.. I like the way it converts all your pictures files to png and makes them as small as possible.