How can i make my website faster?

Many articles in this website are concerned with attracting visitors to a website through effective Internet Marketing. A successful website, however requires such visitors to be retained for as long as possible. A key factor to achieving this is by allowing users to move through the sitefrom page to page quickly inorder to minimise any frustrating pauses where elements of the site are loaded.

But how can this be achieved?

Review the size of each element of the site, especially the frontpage. These can be separated into the likes of html pages, images, external css and javascript files, and swfs.

Because external CSS files must be in the HEAD of your HTML document, they must load first before any BODY content displays. Although they are cached, CSS files slow down the initial display of your page.

External scripts are less reliably cached than CSS files so consider combining scripts into one, or even embedding them into high-traffic pages.

Assuming that you specify the HEIGHT and WIDTH of your images, this size allows your page to display content in well under 8 seconds, the average time users are willing to wait for a page to display without feedback.

Also consider optimizing your scripts and eliminating features to reduce this to a more reasonable size.

For external files, try to keep them less than 1160 bytes to fit within one higher-speed TCP-IP packet (or an approximate multiple thereof). Consider optimizing your CSS and eliminating features to reduce this to a more reasonable size.

Font and style tags are generally a bad use of file size as CSS can accomplish the same results from a cached external file.

Unnecessary code/meta/link tags can also pad-out code unncessarily - Dreamweaver is a common culprit.

Invalid code clearly represents 'web waste'.

Many webpages develop over time which can lead to unnecessarily complex tabling as new features are added. A retabling exercise from scratch can generally simplify things considerably. Browsers can slow down when processing complex tabling, whatever the content held within.

Fixed width layout too wide or not fluid
Comments not optimized
Improper implementation of log file analysis
Unnecessary HTTP requests
Images poorly optimized and saved to wrong file type
Site not as effective in conversion as it could be package, such as Photoshop to control it's settings. For example pay particular attention to whether the image would be of a smaller file size if it is a gif or jpg. If the latter, reduce its jpg quality as far as possible until differences are noticeable to the eye.

When saving also save only to the size it is to appear on the page - it is a real waste of file size to include a jpg in smaller dimensions on your page than that of the actual real size of the file being loaded.

Make sure all images have HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes. This tells the browser how much room to leave for each image, so it can place text and begin displaying the page even if all the parts haven't arrived yet. A partial sight of the page for the user should be enough whilst the rest of the page fills itself in.

You need product images, but try to avoid using images for any other jobs that could be done by text and/or CSS styling. Do you really need fancy graphic buttons for your link menu? Do you really need spacer GIFs all over the place? Be ruthless about simplifying.

Try to make sure that all page components (images, stylesheets, external .js scripts, etc.) are served from within your own site. If the browser has to fetch things from elsewhere, you can estimate a couple of seconds added to the loading time for each external server that must be contacted. Serving things from your own site improves the speed and also makes you less vulnerable to glitches elsewhere.

I've also heard that for some reason omitting the "alt" attribute slows things up a bit. Even if it were milliseconds, on pages with a lot of spacer gifs it would add up.

Another thing is the way tables are rendered by the browser. If a few smaller tables are used instead of one big one for the entire page, it can give an illusion a lot more speed because loading can be progessive instead of waiting for the whole thing. There's something to look at while the rest of the page loads.

Alt is a required attribute on all images - so omitting it means your HTML is invalid. Where spacers are used simply use alt="" to satisfy this problem.

By specifying table-layout:fixed in your CSS and giving each <col> a width the browser can start displaying the table when it gets the first row, rather than having to wait for all the rows to load.