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How to Increase Your Site Loading Speed
Back in the days of the 56kb dial-up connection, web designers focused completely on streamlined content in order to get their content to the visitor as quickly as possible, because the connection speeds were very slow, it would take what seemed like an age to load a single web page. These sites would have minimal use of images and other rich multimedia content and would be focused purely on the page content.
When the broadband connection speeds came in, designers appeared to forget about the streamlined content and favoured the use of Flash and other rich multimedia content to make their content look as pretty (or not so) as humanly possible, sometimes creating pages that would take minutes to load on the dial-up connections. Now with the search engines like Google factoring in page loading speeds into their ranking algorithms, the focus has slid back to streamlined content.
There are a number of ways to increase the loading speed of your site from caching to image sprites; this article will touch on a few of the quickest methods to implement that benefit your site.
Browser Caching - Most net browsers let sites to cache content on to the users' computer to save on download times for files. By setting Expires and cache-control headers in the HTACCESS file on the web server, designers can basically save files on to the users' machine rather than requiring the download of the file every visit. This in incredibly useful for larger static files such as images that rarely change on the site, the exception being if the user is visiting the site for the first time, or has emptied their cache
Http compression - Most modern browsers support data compression for HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, this allows the content to be directed to the users' browser in a compacted form, usually gzip or deflate, which may result in a large decrease in download time, but at the sacrifice of server resources. Compression isn't always effective however, compressing images or other binary files such as pdfs can actually make them larger or reduce the quality, the same is applied for small web pages that are less than 500 bytes.
Cleaner Code - By taking away white space and comments from your code you can drastically reduce the size of the document, language specific changes such as removing the unused selectors and the last semi-colon in each declaration in CSS files and using smaller separate names in JavaScript files can further reduce the file size and, as a result, decrease download times.
Image optimization - By optimizing images you can take away needless data from the file and make it smaller, Image editors such as Adobe's Photoshop have save for web features which further optimise the compression of images over the standard save function while resulting in only a minor loss of quality for the lossy compression types such as JPEG.
By using the methods above, you could reduce the download time for your web pages by half, and it will help your position in the Google rankings, Why not try it?
When the broadband connection speeds came in, designers appeared to forget about the streamlined content and favoured the use of Flash and other rich multimedia content to make their content look as pretty (or not so) as humanly possible, sometimes creating pages that would take minutes to load on the dial-up connections. Now with the search engines like Google factoring in page loading speeds into their ranking algorithms, the focus has slid back to streamlined content.
There are a number of ways to increase the loading speed of your site from caching to image sprites; this article will touch on a few of the quickest methods to implement that benefit your site.
Browser Caching - Most net browsers let sites to cache content on to the users' computer to save on download times for files. By setting Expires and cache-control headers in the HTACCESS file on the web server, designers can basically save files on to the users' machine rather than requiring the download of the file every visit. This in incredibly useful for larger static files such as images that rarely change on the site, the exception being if the user is visiting the site for the first time, or has emptied their cache
Http compression - Most modern browsers support data compression for HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, this allows the content to be directed to the users' browser in a compacted form, usually gzip or deflate, which may result in a large decrease in download time, but at the sacrifice of server resources. Compression isn't always effective however, compressing images or other binary files such as pdfs can actually make them larger or reduce the quality, the same is applied for small web pages that are less than 500 bytes.
Cleaner Code - By taking away white space and comments from your code you can drastically reduce the size of the document, language specific changes such as removing the unused selectors and the last semi-colon in each declaration in CSS files and using smaller separate names in JavaScript files can further reduce the file size and, as a result, decrease download times.
Image optimization - By optimizing images you can take away needless data from the file and make it smaller, Image editors such as Adobe's Photoshop have save for web features which further optimise the compression of images over the standard save function while resulting in only a minor loss of quality for the lossy compression types such as JPEG.
By using the methods above, you could reduce the download time for your web pages by half, and it will help your position in the Google rankings, Why not try it?
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