How Can I Make My Site Load And Work Faster?

[RaveNBlack 0]

Ok, as you have started discussion on raster image formats and which to use when, I?ll give the very basic idea of most popular formats and where to use them.Let?s start from the very most popular ones :)GIF ? expanded as Graphic Interchange Format. Initially created to be universal graphic file format to transfer graphical information between different systems. Supports transparency; frame-by-frame animation; can be interlaced, supports up to 256 colours palette though. Very popular in web as is small in size due to little number of colours and is supported by almost every graphic browser known.It is raster image format. It means it safes image as sequence of dots along with parameters for every dot.Best to be used for non-photo quality images and short animations, images that need to preserve sharp edges, as GIF is loose less format with no compression.JPG/JPEG ? expanded as Joint Photographic Experts Group. Initially invented to store photographic quality images as supports up to 16926659444736 colours. It became popular in web because of it compression possibility thus reducing size. As well as gif ? is supported by almost every browser. Unfortunately it looses quality when compressed. Does not support transparency or animation.Best to be used for high quality, full colour images.BMP stands for Windows BitMap. Very heavy when comes to terms of size. For a long time been used as MS Windows (pre Y2K) graphic format (i.e. as desktop wallpapers) as was the only one supported by windows. For a long time was supported by Internet Explorer only, thus not so popular in websites. It is raster format with no compression and can save photo quality images.PNG ? stands for Portable Network Graphics. Initially invented to replace GIF. It?s advantage to GIF is that PNG can store photographic quality images (i.e. 16926659444736 colours), as well as GIF it supports transparency and can be interlaced, but PNG can not store animation. PNG uses loose less compression thus can be used alongside with JPG. PNG is supported by most graphic web browsers.TIF/TIFF ? stands for Tagged Image File Format. Initially created to store uncompressed images, which is similar to BMP. Difference is that TIF was supported by Windows as well as by Mac so it became more popular for image storage. Now it uses loose less compressions. Most popular ones are LZW and ZIP algorithms for TIF compression. Because of its big size, it is not used in websites and little (if any) browser can support this format. Due to its ability to store high quality images and support by most Graphic Software Packages as well as Operating Systems it became de facto standard in publishing.That?s it for know folks

[mik 0]

There have been some very good suggestions in the previous posts of ways to make a website load quicker.Here is my own non technical suggestion - (note: requires self discipline).1. Take a critical look at offending (slow loading) website.2. Say to youself, "Right, I am going to redesign this website without using any graphics".3. Redesign your website to give it a fresh new look. Make up for the lack of snazzy images or flashy-type fireworks by clever use of color and good design technique. Learn all the tricks you can do with stylesheets. Have a look at lots of other websites for ideas, bookmark the ones you like, particularly if you like the color scheme, so that you can go back to them at a later date. 4. Take your time with your redesign, what might look good to you one week might not look so good the following week.5. Once you are happy with the look of your new website, or you think that it is as good as you can make it - then you can try adding Flash, sounds, images, whatever.6. Test loading times with/without the extras.7. Take informed decision which extras to keep that do not have too great an impact on loading time.8. Go back over the previous posts (to this post) and check that you have implemented all the good suggestions that were made.

[lairz 0]

Dude all your tips and tricks are right, bu i think you are getting a little extreme here, basically you are telling to not use to much graphics, not use flash, not use backgrounds, not use effects, dudes your site will a blank page lol Heres the thing first of all you need to know how much you need to optimize your site, for example, if you know tha most of the people in your country or people who the web is oriented, have a fast internet conection well you dont have to worry so much of this things. About images: of course reducing the size and optimizing them will help, it wont be huge impact unless all your site its about images.Flash: you can make even full flash sites and it will load fast, its just matter of estructuring your site, and not making the whole site in just a movie.Background imgaes: background images just take about 12k or something like that, thats nothing no loading time.

[iGuest 3]

You can try not to hot link other people stuff to your site because then it will need to make a new connection for it. And might increase your loading time.

you need to do this to get good SEO results

[andreip 0]

Ok lets start with the begining. All things on your website, text, images, flash, scripts will be downloaded by your browser in order to see your website. That's why in order to make your site run faster and better you must make sure that is valid website and meet the criteries of W3C Web Consortium . This will not only make your website run faster but also will save a considerable amount of bandwith. In order to that you need to learn the basis of valid (x)HTML and CSS. You can learn them at W3Schools . Get used to validate your pages. You can do that here . You can also validate your CSS there not only your HTML. It would take some time for me to explain all the things such as captioning the images, optimize them for web, improve your website's SEO and all the things. I only wanted you to get to know how you can do what you asked. Furthermore you have to learn it by yourself. There are plenty of books, websites and other resources where you can learn. I'm always avaivable to help as much as I dont have to explain an entire history.

 

Cheers!

[Soviet Rathe 1]

It's always a good idea to GZip your pages.

If you are using PHP it is very easy all you have to do is:

place this code at the VERY TOP of your pages

<? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>

This will compress the data for most browsers by up to 90%

 

If you are not using PHP then it can be a little harder to GZip your pages. see http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ for a better understanding

 

Go here http://obsolete.whatsmyip.org/ to see if your browser is requesting compressed data and to test your website and see if it is GZipped

 

Here is what the GZip tester says about my website

 

http://error404.000webhost.com/ is gzipped

 

Original Size: 27.55 KB

Gzipped Size: 6.08 KB

Data Savings: 77.93%

Edited November 4, 2009 by Soviet Rathe (see edit history)

[inverse_bloom 0]

Hey thats not bad, I've heard about that before but not enough to be interested. I'll have to check into it. Giff images are an excellent alternative to the JPEG format for graphic images. Basically don't save images that contain too many tonal graduations as the Giff format. Giff's aren't good for photographs for example, for that use JPEG's or PNG's.