Speed Up Your Loading Time

One thing that users typically don’t like about some websites is that it takes too long for them to load. For every second it takes for a site to load from a link or a results page, the more likely it is that they’re going to hit the stop button or the back arrow. Obviously, this isn’t something you want. Here are a few ideas to minimize that problem.

More often than not, the problem is with the media files on your website. Think what you will about dial up, but many people still use it. If you have large media files, it might be a good idea to shrink them down some.

Typically, the visual files are what you’ll have to worry about. If the images are too large, it will naturally slow down the load rate as they wait for the pictures to load. Shrink down the size, maybe fuzz up the resolution a little, and they’ll load faster. Ultimately, the fewer kilobytes or megabytes an image file is, the quicker it loads.

With that in mind, you should also minimize the bells and whistles on your website. No one honestly likes animated backgrounds and midi soundtracks. For some reason, some amateur page developers think this is cool. Besides sucking up loading time, they also will tend to distract from the readability of your page. If a visitor has to strain their eyes too much, they’ll just leave your page.

Make sure that you don’t have any automatically opening audio or video files. These can especially slow down the page loading time. They’re much larger than image files and can totally suck up some people’s bandwidth. Besides, many people don’t expect to encounter instant audio when they go to a website, and it could annoy them. Especially if they’re return visitors.

Another big thing to be careful about is using Flash. This is actually a far more dangerous practice than having large image files. Most people will skip a Flash intro, so don’t even bother with it. A page heavy with Flash, or one completely designed from Flash, will be huge and take forever to download. If you absolutely MUST use Flash, use it minimally or make sure you have a non-Flash, straight HTML option. Contrary to popular belief, many people can’t view Flash anyway.

Flash-heavy pages have other detriments to getting traffic to your site. For one thing, they don’t tend to rank as well on the search engines. Partly, that’s due to the loading time. Also, the search engines can’t read content in Flash, and a Flash intro will just completely turn them back.

Minimize your coding. The more HTML coding you have on your site, the larger it is, and naturally, it will take longer to load. One way to do this is instead of reciprocally linking every page on your site, try using three-way linking. It still gives you the good stuff from reciprocal linking, and it gets rid of junk coding.