Ways to speed up the downloading time of your web pages

In today’s world where time is everything; those who are surfing the net and looking for some useful informative content want everything they are looking for in max. 5 seconds. If it takes any longer then users are all likely to push the "back" or “close” button, leaving your site nowhere.

So if any of the website took ages to load; is certainly going to loose on every business front. Who’s going to wait to explore your website if your pages downloading slowly? Neither site visitors and of course not even you. Slow loading websites always turn away the visitors and harm its credibility. It is one of the most crucial factor which decides the success or failure of your website. A fast loading website holds the attention and encourages visitors to explore every aspects of your website which is directly proportional to higher sales.

You can make site of multiple pages and add necessary artistic decorations but must adhere to certain set of rules to minimize wait time:-

Appropriate graphics usage: Using too many graphics is the sole reason in 9 out of 10 cases which slowdown your website’s downloading speed. Therefore, always do the best efforts to reduce the number of images and pictures in your web pages. If it’s a must necessity then try to repeat the same graphic on other pages also instead of using different ones because once downloaded it got stored in a computer’s cache and there is no need arises to download it again.

Decrease the quantity of colors: You should better reduce the numbers of colors used in the graphics. Try to avoid using GIF or JPEG files which requires thousands of colors. Using fewer colors significantly low down the size of the graphics which subsequently enhances site’s downloading speed.

Use html text: As the size of html text is much smaller than the graphic text so try to use it in abundance as it will decrease your page size which speed up downloading.

Avoid redundancy in coding: Designing a site using softwares such as frontpage, dreamweaver etc often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page unnecessarily larger and make it harder to crawl. That’s why it’s better to minimize such coding; it might save 1/3^rd of your downloading time.

Use CSS: CSS generally requires less code. All code relative to layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then cached on the user's computer. Web page using CSS are mostly smaller than the tabular layouts. With CSS you can control the downloading order of the items on to the screen i.e. you can make the content appear before slow-loading images.

Minimize flash usage: Most cool websites with fancy effects are built using Flash. Its ok with using decorative images for banners and other necessary branding but you should avoid them in rest of the segments. Avoid strewing images over the site just to add glitter. It’s good to populate your website with useful images rather than decorative ones as it causes slow page loading. So try to avoid using flash unless it is absolutely necessary.

Use fewer links: Try to minimize the use of links to max. 6-7 links per page as fewer links requires less memory and comparative easy downloading. Using too many links other than decreasing the download also confuses visitors. So try to keep them simple and neat.

Include height and width tags: You should better include height and width tags on your page graphics source tags. This allows the browser to "pre-allocate" the space for the graphic on the display, which ultimately speed up downloadings. In addition using ALT tags with the images is also beneficial relative to downloading speed.

Avoid free hosting: Server speed of your website host largely influence the speed of your website's downloading speed. So it’s better to avoid "free" hosting as nothing is really free. It lacks the resources to provide fast and reliable servers.

The web is highly user-driven as internet users choose the sites they would like more information about; here they can skip any unnecessary ads or content unlike television and other forms of media. So it's important that your website be the one users visit which means speeding up the downloading of web pages. Therefore it’s necessary that you incorporate the ways mentioned above and optimizing all these site speed factors will surely increase site’s downloading significantly.