Kenneth Dreyer

Load time is an very important factor to any site, since your users won’t be waiting around for your pages to load if it takes forever. This especially goes for your new visitors. There are of course several things you can do to speed up your website, both easy tricks and harder ones.

Tips to reduce your page load time

• Use CSS for faster pages. Learn to seperate the content from the design. By using CSS you allow the browser to cache all the formatting and stylizing so it won’t have to go through each and every single tag over and over again. Also it makes your code much better to look at, and more readable for crawlers (search engine robots).
• Use external scripts. If you use the same script on multiple pages, it might be an good idea to switch to external scripts. This was the browser can cache the script and won’t have to reload it everytime the page loads. This will save a ton of load time for larger scripts.
• Load as few external sources as possible. It’s better to load a 5kb CSS file, than two 2.5kb ones. Also if your design uses a dozen of GIFs, try cleaning up with a fancy new CSS design instead.
• Allow static images, stylesheets and javascript to be unconditionally cached by the browsers. This won’t do any good for your first time users, but it will do wonders to those who surf your site alot.
• Host your sites closer to your users. If 80% of your users are located in Norway, place your server there too.
• Don’t need it? Remove it. Of course there will always be some people who fancy flash, background music and other cool apps that tages ages to load. Do you really need to showcase all your skills on the same page? Make a blog to show them of in, don’t ruin your site.
• Avoid nested tables. When you place a table inside another table, it takes a lot longer for the browser to work out the spacing since it has to wait to read the entire html and then work out the layout. If at all possible, try using CSS to create the columns on your page. Better yet, don’t use tables for design at all. Again, seperat design from content.
• If your site contains alot of information, and includes very long pages, try splitting them into multiple pages. Multiple pages will load faster than one big one. Also, your users won’t get so tired of the scrolling.
• Put your script in the bottom. Many of us use analytics to measure the acitivity of our sites. Put it in the bottom of your site, so we don’t have to wait for an external server to respond before loading the actual site.

Optimize your images

• Don’t go overboard. Yeah, we all know images can make your site look fancy, but do you really need to fill it? Quite a few nice effects can be applied with CSS, some even without using images at all).
• Define height and width. Even if your image fits perfect to whereever your using it, always remember to define the height and width of the image. This way the browser won’t have to load the image first, to know what size it is. This will keep the browser from loading the images before the text.
• Optimize your images. There are tons of free tools out there you can use to optimize your images to a smaller filesize, without loosing to much quality. Neither you or your users will see any difference, except for the pages loading a lot faster.

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