Fast loading website - How To?
Friday, August 29th, 2008
Are you
interested in getting your website to load in the browser
quickly? In case you have a personal website for hobby sake, it
may be no big deal but if you are responsible for a corporate
website attracting customers, this can be tremendously
important. If the homepage takes forever to load into the
browser, you may be losing out on crucial business. The only
solution is to design the page again so that visitors or
customers who open it stay there.
We need
to understand that not every internet connection works on Cable,
T1 or ISDN. A major number of surfers in the world still use
modems today (normally 56.6Kbps). Therefore it is imperative
that the site design should take into consideration that it
should load quickly on a low speed internet
connection.
style="font-weight: normal">
class="MsoNormal">Designparameters that have to be kept in mind are very
simple:
style="font-weight: normal">Loading time depends upon the size
(disk size) of the page. More space is occupied when you
integrate images and multimedia content. The bigger the size,
the larger the bandwidth required assuming that the loading time
is constant. Multimedia files containing sound (.wav) occupy a
lot of space (for example, a sound clip of 30 seconds occupies
about 140KB). Video content is more taxing (at least 1MB). This
content should be weeded out of the home page unless you feel
that it can make or break your website. If you feel that you
should keep these, make sure the page sizes are around 30-40K.
Or you could put them on another page linked form your homepage.
style="font-weight: normal">Images can also get very large in
size, especially if they are of high resolution. Keep the image
size as small as possible. A page with a 600X600 image would
take a long time to load. Image size depends upon the size. They
can also be compressed using certain utilities available free on
the internet.
style="font-weight: normal">
class="MsoNormal">Try and useimages that you have used on your homepage, on the other pages
also instead of changing them. When the images are opened for
the first time, they are stored in the browsers cache, and
subsequently loaded from there. This will fasten the loading
process immensely.
style="font-weight: normal">
class="MsoNormal">Another wayto load images quickly is by defining the image dimensions in
the image tags. By this, the browser understands the amount of
space required for the image and it does not need to readjust
text and other content after loading the image. This will also
prevent page jumping during the image loading
process.
style="font-weight: normal">
class="MsoNormal">The homepage should be short and descriptive. The longer the page more
is the time taken to load. All extra information can be moved to
subsequent pages and linked to the homepage. This will also help
organizing the website better. class="MsoNormal">
For more
tips on speeding up your website, visit http://
style="font-family:Arial">
www.cobbwebdesign.com.
