The load time of websites is one of the most important factors
affecting its usability; most Internet users will just skip a site
altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Below you
will find the summary of the “Speed Up Your Site” series. Those are
simple yet effective ways to make sure that your website is running
fast. You can click on each point to read the article with comments from
the readers.
- Optimize Images:
always use the “Save for the web” feature included on image editing
software. Images represent the heavier load on virtually any website so
make sure you are optimizing them. Alternatively you can also turn to an
online image optimizer.
- Image Formats:
apart from optimizing images it is important that you choose the right
format. JPEG format is suitable for photographs or true-color images.
The GIF format should be used with flat-color images like logos or
buttons. PNG works very similar to GIF but it supports more colors.
- Optimize Your CSS: most websites are designed with CSS nowadays. Make sure to aggregate and clean your CSS. CleanCSS is an online tool that will merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.
- Use a Slash on Your Links:
when a user opens a link on the form “http://www.domain.com/about” the
server will need to figure what kind of file or page is contained on
that address. If you include a slash (/) at the end of the link the
server will already know that this is a directory page, reducing the
load time of the site.
- Use the Height and Width Tags:
many people forget to add the Height and Width tags on image codes.
Those tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image
before loading it. The result is that it will reserve a spot for the
images while loading the rest of the page, speeding up the whole
process.
- Reduce the HTTP Requests:
when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line)
will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several
seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of
objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.
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