The speed at which your web pages load should be one of your top priorities as a netpreneur. We live in the world of pressing time constraints, infinite choice and instant gratification – if your website is slow, then people will leave in droves. And it’s also likely that your website will be penalised by the search engines.
Whilst technology is advancing rapidly and our broadband connections are getting faster and faster (unless of course you live in Australia!), people’s expectations, too, are increasing. Most people expect instantaneous connection times and lightning-fast page loads. Any lag in time will almost certainly result in the visitor cancelling their session with you and heading off to another website on the internet – most likely a competitor.
How do I know if my site is fast or not? You can use Firebug http://getfirebug.com/ to identify and monitor speed issues with your site. SEO software iBusinessPromoter also provides information about your page loading speed.
So how can you speed up your website:
- Use the right image format. Make sure that photo images use the JPG format, whilst GIF is used for images with solid colours, like graphs and charts.
- Resize your images. Make sure that your images are correctly scaled to the size that they appear, rather than have a large image render within smaller dimensions. This will reduce the size of the image considerably and result in a faster download time.
- Lose the Flash. See my earlier post about Flash animations. They look nice, but they will slow down your site (and impact upon your search engine optimisation too)
- Keep other multimedia and dynamic elements to a minimum. Go easy on the animations and sound, and reduce the widgets that draw content from off-site sources.
- Use optimised CSS. Cascading Style Sheets allow you to control all page styles from a separate text file. The use of CSS removes the need for duplicate styling tags throughout your HTML and thus reduces the size of your files. CSS has the added advantage of permitting universal changes without having to edit multiple style tags – change the one style in your CSS stylesheet and it is reflected throughout your site.
- Move Javascript and other inline code to separate files. If your website uses lots of javascript or embedded code, it might be possible to move this code to a separate file and call on it from the parent HTML page. This can help greatly with search engine optimsation because it removes extraneous, unindexable content from your HTML files.
- Use AJAX. A new technology, AJAX stands for ‘asynchronous javascript and XML’ – it enables a website to display dynamic content without refreshing the entire page.
- Use ‘Loading’ prompts where speed cannot be improved. Sometimes it is necessary for your website to ‘think’ – ie. when it is drawing information from a database or via an XML link. In this situation, it’s a good idea to tell the user that the page is loading via a pop-up box or similar.
- Use cached pages for dynamic websites. You might consider ‘caching’ regularly accessed pages, rather than have them reconstitute from your database each time they are called.
