Having only been living life in the high speed internet lane for a short period of time, I find myself making every effort to be as sympathetic as possible to my dial-up readers and the readers of my clients.
Based on what I’ve found on a few free tools listed below is — I’m still not doing enough!
Websites with all the bells and whistles are great — but are they really getting any type of real return on an investment of that magnitude?
Some tips for increasing your pages loading time:
Use images sparingly – pictures do add to the overall appearance, but consider using fewer photos if your page load time is too slow.
Optimize those images – Taking just a few minutes extra to reduce the size of images can add a great deal of time to your loading time.
Minimize animation and flash usage – In my dial-up days, I wouldn’t last 10 seconds on a website using flash — talk about losing customers hand-over-fist.
Use images designed for backgrounds instead of full images.
Avoid using multimedia files – Don’t use these files, especially as background music. It slows down the loading time and for the most part, people just don’t like clicking on a website and music blaring in the background.
Have I missed anything?
How do you increase your loading time? Or have you even considered it?
Check your sites speed for free at:
or with The FireBug FireFox Plugin at – Get Fire Bug
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
i need all those tips, especially the too many pictures not optimized.
send me your blog button for my mother’s day blogroll + enter my giveaways + spread the word please. happy mother’s day
mod*mom
http://modmom.blogspot.com
thanks for the tips Gayla. I’ve tried not to add pics to every post but I still have to add some from time to time, otherwise it hurts my own eyes looking at the page.
Another tip:
Use lean and valid code with CSS for the presentation. Downloading and caching a CSS file once is much better than loading all the layout and presentation of each page every time you click a link.
Cutting down and optimising images and flash sorts out the big stuff, but the little things count too!
I’m with Phil…CSS/Semantic HTML. Less code means quicker load (and render) times.
I wish I could stay away from video…I just can’t though.
Some really good suggestions, Gayla.
I love my pics! But you’re right. It does make the page a little slower to load. I’ll have to keep an eye on that. Thanks for the tips!
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