Speed
If your Website is slow, customers will leave before the graphics load. Sometimes when users encounter a graphics-intensive site, they search for an alternative while that page is loading. Your customers will do the same. Optimize your Website’s graphics and code so that it loads quickly.
Try using Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Image Ready or Photoshop to optimize your graphics. Make the size of your graphic files as small as possible without compromising too much on image quality.
Optimize your code. There are several utilities that will eliminate extra data from HTML files to make a page smaller in size. Use them on every page on your site. Try Google’s Speed Tool – Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser. The best practices cover many of the steps involved in page load time, including resolving DNS names, setting up TCP connections, transmitting HTTP requests, downloading resources, fetching resources from cache, parsing and executing scripts, and rendering objects on the page. Essentially Page Speed evaluates how well your pages either eliminate these steps altogether, parallelize them, and shorten the time they take to complete.
Reuse graphics. Avoid creating extra graphics when you can use an existing one. A different graphic might make the site look nicer, but the existing graphic will have loaded and be in the visitor’s cache. Your pages will load faster if a visitor’s browser only has to download the new HTML.
If you follow these basic tips, you will be well on your way to making your website faster.
