“People hate waiting”. If your website is not loading within 4-5 seconds, you are likely to lose a lot of visitors. Normally we assume that people are seeing our blog at the same speed as we are. It is hard to pinpoint the exact culprit that is slowing down your web page. As there are many different elements like CSS, JavaScript, Images, Flash, Frames etc. which take time in loading.
There are a number of surfers who have modems less than 56K. Everyone does not have Cable Modem, ISDN or T1 connection to the internet. Hence, it is very important for a web designer to see that his/her sites load as fast as possible.
When you view your web page, your content loads in a specific order. Images and Media are the main bandwidth hogs and take a lot of time in loading. I would suggest you to remove all forms of multimedia embedded in your front page of website except for images. You can put a background song on your web page, but normally these sound files capture a lot of bandwidth, especially if it is a .wav file. Video files should be avoided unless there is a need and keep the file sizes small. But still try and use such files in other pages of your website because as I said “People hate waiting”.
Now the next big thing that worries a lot is the images. You have to be very careful while dealing with images. Use smaller dimensions for images to reduce the file size and for this you can use the image editing programs which helps in resizing the images. You can also take help of some of the special services available on web and with these you can compress your images. This also helps you in choosing the image that can still look good after you have compressed them. If the size of image that you have used is 500 pixels x 500 pixels, people will keep waiting and page might take forever to load.
Once you have the image as compact as you want, you can use that image in other pages of your website and you can save time in loading. The image will be in the browser’s cache which you loaded on the front page for the surfer and it will load instantly when called on the other pages. With this, you will be able to load other things without worrying for the image.
There is one more thing that you can do, just define the width and height of the image in your entire image tags. Your time will be saved in adjusting many things once the image starts loading and your page will not jump when an image loads.
You can also use thumbnails which further link to full size images in new window and for videos; you can use a video hosting service like You Tube or VideoEgg etc. to upload the file and this displays a player in your posts.
Reducing the amount of content displayed on the front page will reduce the load time of your website. The extended post element allows you to display an introduction on your main page and the remainder of the post on post’s permalink page e.g. a link to “read more” will be displayed at the end of the post.
These were some of the tricks that you can use if your website or blog loads slowly. I am sure you will definitely save some extra time and there is a possibility that it may reduce clutter a little bit.
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