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04 August 2010
In recent years, the importance that was once given to fast loading pages has faded given the fact that over the years, broadband connections have really picked up. Attention span of the users has probably decreased over the years. Besides, site owners tend to forget that there are millions who are still using the dial up services and even these make a certain percentage of their customers.
If a page doesn’t load quickly , irrespective of whether the person is a rural or urban inhabitant, he will prefer to go elsewhere for his purchases. Major search engines like Google, are now incorporating the speed factor into their ranking algorithm. A page should now take at most 25 seconds to load. There are several tools on the web that help you in getting away with these kind of situations. For instance, PageSpeed is one of them. It is a free add from Firefox which helps in evaluating your web page and gives ways to improve on it.
There are several ways in which you can optimize your page loading speed. It is advisable that all graphic editors optimize images for the web. The size of an image shouldn’t exceed 10-12KB ideally. It is to be noted that using height and width tags is not much of a help. Though visually the image appears smaller in the browser, the actual size remains the same. Instead of using full size images on your web page, it will be an intelligent decision to use thumbnails. A thumbnail is a smaller version of an image and the user can view a larger version of it by clicking on the thumbnail. Try and use the minimum number of animations, flashy pictures that keep changing and rotating as they make the web page more slow, making it annoying for the viewer. Using a common image folder is another tactic to increase the speed of your page. In this case, the browser has to fetch the image from the server instead of reloading it from the cache. This implies that the site has the same image on a number of pages. It lessens the chances of duplicating images. If you are using tables as the basic framework of your web site, then it is best to divide your tables into header, middle and footer tables. This way the viewer is able to see atleast part pf the page while the rest is loading and chances are that he might decide to wait a little longer for it to upload fully. Make full use of the Cascading Style Sheets in such cases. It makes the site wide formatting updates faster too.
A long upload time is a factor that causes irritation to many viewers. This way you lose out on many customers and a lot of business. It is advisable that you take note of at least some of the aforementioned basic and simple tips and implement them immediately if you haven’t already! Otherwise, you are not the sole seller in the market.
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