One of the most critical aspects of web design is the consideration of web page load time. Load time is very essential in the success of every website, may it be a personal website, corporate website or an ecommerce site. Generally, people surf the internet to look for information, and they want it fast! If you cannot provide the information they needed within few seconds, most likely, they will hit the back button and move to another website, probably your competitors’ website. Which means a website owner lost another potential customer.

Sophisticated and dazzling website is useless if it takes forever to load. In essence, slow loading web sites turn off visitors which could be your potential customer. So, here are some tips in how to increase the load time of your website.

Trim down the Graphics

Avoid using heavy graphic. Graphic could surely liven your website but too much of it can hurt the performance of your website. Try to use fewer amounts of images while maintaining the look of the website design. If you have large images that are very important for the website, use section like "Gallery" to reduce web page load time.

Minimize the use animated GIF’s and flash. Yes, they are cute but they usually slow down the loading times so use sparingly. Wherever possible use very few animated gifs and flash files.

Optimize graphics. Optimize your graphics by using image editing software like Photoshop, GIMP or whatever editor you like. Appropriately resized and cropped images will greatly reduce the loading times of a page and at the same time maintaining their integrity. Trim down the Codes

Optimize HTML files. Remove all unnecessary codes which usually happen when using an HTML generator, remove some extra or empty tags get inserted in the code such as breaking spaces, block quotes, unnecessary extra space, blank lines etc. Even if you manually coded your HTML files, check your website for empty and unnecessary HTML tags. Apply appropriate DOCTYPE and close all HTML markup elements. The browser will then have less work to do matching elements. Clean coding of a web page will not only reduce website load time but also increases your text-to-code ratio and search engine spiders do not have to spend time deciphering irrelevant stuff.

Compress JavaScript and CSS files. You can compress your CSS file by using shorthand external CSS. This can help make your website design code compact as well as clean and its proper usage helps reduce website loading time. You can do this by defining most common font styles, images etc. in one single external CSS, then all you have to do is insert the same tags repetitively on different pages by just calling the CSS. The other method is to compress the JavaScript and CSS files through the Minify Engine or by using a Wordpress Plugin (if you are using Wordpress Plaform) called WP Minify which actually grabs all your .js and .css files, sends them to the Minify Engine, compresses them and replaces the old codes with the new ones. It is safe to use but make sure to backup you file before replacing.

Other Stuffs

Avoid using multimedia files. If it’s not the "life and death" factor of your website avoid using multimedia files especially putting on background music. It’s actually irritating by the long run and it could hurt your website load time badly.

Use fewer redirects, Iframes, PhP and database queries can also help reduce website loading time. If you have a database driven website, it is faster and more secure to place your content on one server and your database on another. And if you can afford it, it is advisable to host on a high-end server with fast connectivity to decrease website loading time.

If you have implemented the suggestions above check your load time by using plugins such as Fasterfox in Firefox or with a free web page analyzer you can found on the internet.

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