Speeding Up Your Website

Make your site quicker: improve traffic, less cost

There are many ways to enhance the experience users have of your website.

One of the best ways is to ensure that the site is quick to download and therefore people can view your pages without any sort of delay that might make them leave.

This is good for you too - the quicker the site to download through to leaner pages, the less bandwidth you use and therefore your traffic allocation will go further and ultimately you may be able to reduce your costs or at least ensure they do not increase exponentially as your site grows and gets bigger.

One common area where you can speed up your site is through reducing the size of your images. Of course images tend to be much bulkier than the content of your page, and therefore optimising images is a good idea.

Make sure that your JPEGs are no higher quality than they need to be for the web. 100% quality is a waste it doesn't need to be that good. Rather use a program like Irfanview which is free to reduce the size of your files. Some people make the mistake of uploading files such as BMPs which are massive to a web server and then wonder why people leave the site and their bandwidth usage is huge - always, always use a JPEG, GIF or PNG on your website for a fair trade off between filesize (therefore speed) and quality.

Remember that Flash animation may take a while to download as can some animated GIFs so ensure that you reduce these and keep them optimised and to a minimum. The same with any multimedia files that you have on offer.

The text content of a page - the HTML itself - can usually be optimised too for some space savings. Particularly on really popular high traffic sites just taking out a few old comments that are no longer needed can save a lot of bandwidth over the course of a month.

A good way to see if you are speeding up your site successfully is to use a script timer to see how long your page takes to load. You can either write one yourself, get your site designer to use one, or there are many free tools you can use online to measure download speed and see how long a page takes to open.

Page Cacheing and Speed

A perhaps more advanced method again is to look at the cacheing options of your site. If you set things up such that each time a person visits a page it loads again - page set not to cache - then clearly there will be more download than if you allow pages to be cached and the cached version to be used unless a refresh is forced, for instance.

For a review of your site for areas that could be optimised and possible streamlining or to discuss any element of your website, please get in touch with Clarity Media.

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Sep 6th 2006

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