How To Make Your Site Load Faster
How often have you been discouraged about a site not loading and you just decide to give up and leave instead? We live in a fast paced and impatient world and the internet is no exception. As computers get more powerful there is a tendency to embed lots of things on a site, to preoccupy or entertain those surfers. Not everyone has upgraded their older PC however, and you just might lose them, if your page won't load fast enough. I have read somewhere if your site won't load in 3 seconds you might be losing a substantial amount of traffic, that just gives up.
Not all of us are experts that can even understand the lingo of site speed or website optimization. Defer parsing of JavaScript, compressing CSS or specifying an expiration for cacheable resources? That might as well be written in Greek for most of us. I have compressed some CSS for about an 18% benefit, but it's kind of scary and I certainly keep a back up of the original coding. If you don't have any idea what any of this means, don't feel alone. Like most of us, myself included, we just want to go to a site and get it to load or build a site somewhere with the help of the site's own editors and hope it all works out.
Google has put out a pretty useful tool called Page Speed Online. There, you can get stats and tips about the loading speed of your various sites, blogs or pages. As you get into it you might find that it's a little technical, on what you should do exactly to make changes to speed up your sites load time. But you may also find it very educational, if you enjoy learning new site building or optimizing techniques.
Some basic tips for a faster loading site is to consider reducing the amount of images, objects or gadgets on your site. Images and gadgetry type things slow a page down. When designing your site, you might want to consider placing java type gadgetry towards the bottom of your page.
When someone comes to your site and you have javascript codes at the top, the site will try to load them first and the whole page or content, on your page, will come second. On the other hand, if you keep those slower loading things towards the bottom, your content will be showing up to occupy the surfer first , while giving more time for the lower and slower stuff to load.
Its definitely a balancing act of having a cool site that a gaming computer kid with 4 G's of RAM will just love or having some person with an older computer just give up on your site. You can experiment with what images, gadgets, widgets, social buttons, badges, videos or combination work best for your site, to display and satisfy the most, while still keeping that speed.
I hope some of these tips will help your site load faster!
