Things you want to know about websites

 

Fast loading Webpages

The Need

Nobody likes slow loading webpages. Although internet connection speeds are getting faster and better day by day but one cannot assume that every user that accesses internet has a broadband connection. There are still users who use slow internet connections and you should keep this in mind while designing your website.

What can be done?

Yes, the bigger question is what can you do to speed up your pages?

One solution is to keep your page size small as possible.

Every time someone opens a webpage data is transferred from the webserver on which the site is stored/hosted to his/her computer. The more the data is, the larger time it takes to load.

Additional Benefit

One more benefit of having smaller sized webpages is a reduced web hosting bill. The plans that you buy from webhosts has a fixed bandwidth if you exceed this bandwith you have to pay more. So a lower sized website can serve more users in less bandwidth.

Reducing you Website's Size

You can do somethings to get a reduced sized or fast loading webpage such as,

Use CSS instead of tables

Don't use html tables to format your webpage layout, use CSS instead. With CSS, your browser can decide the position and appearance of any object on the screen as soon as it loads it, but if you use tables, your browser can't decide the layout of the page untill it loads all of the tables in the page, which makes it appear slower.

Use an external CSS file

Using an external CSS file instead of including the CSS code in head section of every image has an advantage. Since browsers have caching capabilites, once loaded, an external CSS file can be reused by the browser without reloading it, reducing the loading time.

Don't use Flash movies

Flash movies have relatively large size than other objects in your page, so they take some time to load. If you must use them, reduce the size as much as you can.

Use an appropriate image format

Use an image file format that results in a smaller file size, like gif, png or jpg. This will reduce the file download time. If the quality of the image is not important, you can reduce quality to get a much much smaller file size.

Show small images

Use smaller sized images and show the higher resolution on user's demand only i.e. Only show the bigger image when somebody wants to see it (like when some one clicks it) not to every one.

Don't use html image scaling

To get a smaller sized image, don't reduce the dimensions(height and width) of the image by code(html for example), it does not reduce the file size and takes the same time as it would for a larger image. Edit the image in an image editing software and reduce its dimensions and its file size. It will load quickly.

Use Html or CSS image repeating

Use image repeating capability of Html or CSS wherever you can. For example a symmetrical background image can be displayed by just loading a small portion of the image and then repeating it horizontally and vertically across the page.

Tweak your code

If you used a website developing software and you understand html, check the final code of the page to see if you can reduce the document's size by removing unnecessary code or comments. Website developing softwares generally produce a larger sized code file. To learn Html see my Html Tutorial.

Choose a better host

Last but not the least, choose a better hosting company.


Bookmark or Add to Favourites

Related:

Html Tutorial
Web Hosting

Link to this page :

Copy and paste the following code in an html document to link to this page,