Apart from the obvious benefits the internet has given us in terms of communication and business opportunities, it has also created a mindset where speed is of the essence: I’m talking about website loading times.
Waiting
I recently clicked a link to a website I wanted to look at and waited for it to load; and waited; and waited; and waited. Now the majority of visitors will hang around for perhaps ten seconds max before giving up and clicking another link, but out of curiosity I decided to stick with it and time how long it took for something to appear on my screen, but after about two or three minutes I gave up.
There might have been reasons other than optimisation issues for why that website failed to load, but if your website suffers from slow loading times then the following five simple tips on how to speed it up should help.
Content
Splitting large pages of content into smaller ones is a good start and has the added bonus of turning the copy into more readable blocks – something that will go down well with visitors.
Images
Too many images will really slow down loading time – use them sparingly where possible and keep their file size small.
Widgets
Widgets – more often than not they’re not needed or even appreciated by visitors but they will certainly slow loading times.
Flash
Intro Flash movies and embedded music that play during loading are annoying at the best of times and most visitors tend to skip them anyway.
Tables
Using CSS layers instead of HTML and nested tables will increase loading speed quite noticeably.
The above list is by no means definitive or exhaustive: there is much more you can do to speed up your site’s loading times which I’ll talk about in future posts.
Until next time.
