Site Speed – 5 Ways to Decrease Your Website Loading Time

Have you ever visited a website where you had to wait for it to load before reading the information?

Google has now included site speed as one of its ranking factors. This means slow loading sites may be ranked lower in the search engines than fast loading ones. Check the loading time of your website by goggling “site speed checker.” This will list the websites where you can insert your URL and check the loading time.

5 ways to decrease your website loading time

1. Check for HTML errors

Run your web pages through an HTML validator to find code errors. HTML errors often cause web pages to render incorrectly in the major browsers and increase their loading time. Having clean code makes it easier to return to the original document should you add a design element that causes errors.

2. Reduce the size of your images

Large images will increase the weight of your pages. Instead create thumbnails that link to the larger image. Don’t include too many images on one web page because it will increase the overall file size of that page and slow down its loading time.

3. Limit the use of flash or video

Flash and video files are much larger than image files. Often a visitor needs to wait a while before these files load and appear on the web page. Keep in mind showing videos on your website can use large amounts of bandwidth. If your video gets downloaded by hundreds of people at the same time it may shut down the server so your website will o longer be accessible.

4. Place CSS and JavaScript in external files

Many websites use JavaScript to create dynamic navigation menus. All the JavaScript code is often included within the web page causing it to load slowly. To speed up the loading time place your JavaScript in an external file and reference the file code within the HTML.

Instead of placing all the CSS code within your web page place it in an external style sheet and attach it to your web page by coding the file into your HTML. This will reduce the file size of your web page and increase its loading speed.

5. Use cascading style sheets (CSS) for design

Limit the use of tables for the design of your web pages. It takes longer for browsers to read through them. CSS creates less code than tables thus increasing site speed. You can also control the order of the items that appear on the screen. For example you can code the content to appear before any large images that may load slowly.

If you follow the 5 points mentioned above you’ll have a clean, lean website your visitors will love to visit.

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.DrostDesigns.com