Formatting Tips To Speed Up Your Website - Part 1

One of the most important aspects of your website design is how fast your site loads. Here are a few tips to help speed up your website. Whilst more and more people are getting access to high speed internet, there are some left on dial up. Be kind to those visitors and do a few, simple things to speed up your webpages. Not only will these tips give you a faster load time, most will also help keep your bandwidth fees low as well.

 

Use CSS for Faster Pages

Even if you decide to use tables, CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time. With your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. Also, it cuts down on long drawn out tags and replaces them with smaller class styles instead.

 

Use External Scripts

Are you using the same script on multiple pages? Switch to an external script such as loading javascript files from one source instead of adding all that code to each of your pages like this:

 

<script type="text/javascript" src="yourscript.js"></script>

 

That way the browser already has it in it's cache and won't have to read it each time another page loads. This one saves a ton of load time, specially for larger scripts!

 

Remove Anything You Really Do Not Need

Whilst this may sound obvious sometimes the hardest thing about creating a website is not using every fancy trick that you know. Images, flash and sometimes even sound files are very impressive, but do you really need to showcase all your talents on one page?

 

Embedded sound files are something many people just find annoying anyway. You may be surprised how many are surfing at work. The last thing anyone wants is a loud music or sounds announcing to their boss that they are surfing. Also many people have their own music playing and hearing a song over top of what they are listening to is less than pleasant. As for Java applets, try to ditch them or if you want those effects, JavaScript unusually loads faster and can do just as much or more. Stand back and take a critical look at your website, you may see a few special effects that can be let go of for the sake of faster load time.