It is always said “Faster sites can create happy users” because slow loading website is the most annoying thing for a visitor. It results into sheer disinterest. So, it is necessary to have a fast loading web site so that users don’t wait for long time. Faster loading pages make a better browsing experience. As a result, the user will like to revisit soon. Following are few tips using which you can make sure that your website has a fast load time.
- Compress Images - Though images create an extremely realistic and attractive website, they make your website extremely slow. In addition, the size of the image is another thing that matters for slow loading website which can be avoided by optimizing images. The image optimizers that decrease the file size of .png, .jpg, images can be used. You can remove unnecessary pixels by compressing pictures to reduce size of image and load time. Proper compression can often decrease file size by 50% or even more without any quality loss. It is the best way to improve the download speed of the web pages.
- Use CSS - Can you imagine, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can greatly improve your web sites load time? By using an external Cascading Style Sheet for the formatting purpose of a web page, you actually help the web page to load faster. The reason is with your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the stylizing and formatting for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. Instead of HTML tables, use of CSS along with a CSS optimizer will give you simple source code. It eliminates white spaces and unnecessary characters which will help the site load more quickly.
- Minimum use of Flash and Multimedia - The use of flash animation gives a website a more interactive look as they look fantastic. But equally, they slow down the overall loading time of the website. Hence, it is advisable to avoid them in your website to a large extent. And unless you absolutely need, don’t use multimedia files such as background music and so on. It is better to provide a download link or an online player than using the files like background music etc.
- External Scripts - When you use the same script on more than one page, the browser has to reload the script each time it appears. Here you can use the external scripts. With this you only have to load these external files to the pages rather than adding them to every single page. This method helps to enhance loading speed of the webpage because a single external script is cached in the browser, so it only needs to be loaded once. Thus it reduces the loading time.
- Avoid Full Page Tables - If you use tables, try to avoid the full page tables because until the entire table is read and analyzed, the browser will not load the page. Instead, you can use multiple tables. But while using them use width and height attributes so that each section of the table will know exactly where it should load and how big it should be. Remember that tables should not be nested as placing tables within other tables makes the browser take more time in reading the html codes and then work.
- Remove Whitespace - It is the simplest task while making the website load faster which can cut bytes of data from the web page. Removing whitespace such as extra spaces and unnecessary tabs will help to speed up the website’s loading time. Unwanted space between your codes increases the total size of your webpage which in turn, increases its loading time.
In this way, by following some rule, a site will take minimal time to load. It is essential to speed up your website’s loading time using all the possible ways for an efficient and easier surfing experience for your users.
