How Can I Make My Site Load And Work Faster?

i just wanted to know some extra tricks and tips i can use to make my site work great, being fast, and work well on all browsers. i think this will also help a lot more people and not just me.so lets start a list of things we can do to make our site work better, faster.start your commenting.

Well, first you shouldn't have so many graphic or animations on your site. Try to keep the amount of bandwidth takes to load your site down. If you're running a forum or anything. Try to optimize your database.. table.. etc.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. If you have ads running on your site.. like popups, ads pop in, graphic banner. Try to put each ads code seperately apart .. instead of listing them one after another. Because this will pause your site from loading while the ads load up. So what i did is .. put one banner at the top of your site. And if you have popups or pop in ads, then put the code at the most bottom of your script so it will load last. So your visitor will be able to read or look at something wile the ads are loading up.And of course, you should try to clean your code/script alittle bit.. so the browser or your server won't have to take that long to read the script.

Most of the loading time for a site is due to graphics, not so much the content. The biggest thing you could do if you haven't already done so is convert all images on your site from whatever it currently is to .gif using a program that will remove unused colors from the pallet, this can reduce the size of your site by over 10 times, thus significantly decreasing your site loading time.Another big factor in site loading time is javascript. Removing any javascript that you don't really need can also significantly decrease loading time if you had alot from before that you removed.

i have a suggestiontry to remove any script on your site. sometimes pop up in your site make your site slower. if you have images in your site like your logo or something .. you can cut to any piece so that web will faster to be loadif you choose free hosting make sure there are no ads.

Resizing the images to match the size they take up on your site will help also.
If you have an 800 x 600 image that only takes up 80 x 60 on your site, create a new, smaller version of the image for the clients to use, instead of making the clients download the full sized image.

Limiting the number of images on each page will help also. Break up image intensive pages into several smaller ones. Makes the pages easier to manage, and faster for clients to download.

Also, using a site wide css file rather than having the same css embedded in to each of your pages will help overall performance. The client ony has to download the css file once into their cache.

Here is a link to use to check yur site loading times and it also offers suggestions to do exactly what you are asking about.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Use this link to analyze your pages, make the suggested changes, then run the analyzer again to see how effective it was in cleaning up the site.

that depends on hosting connection, user connection if u use mysql on your site you have some programs to compress sql and to make mysql to work faster and depends on your template if have a lot of images it`s slower

onvert all images on your site from whatever it currently is to .gif

THe only problem with that is it will greatly affect the quality of your images, so my advice is a little more graphic specific, if your image contains 1 to 200 colors (that is solid colors, no gradient) then use gif, if it has a lot of gradients don't use .gif, NEVER use .bmp, or .tiff. I personaly try to avoid .png unless it is required for the style of the page. And if you use .jpg don't use 100% as the quality setting. I try anything from 85-95 depending of the content of the image. But the most you should use is 99% as the 1% diffrence isn't noticable, however it will decrease the image size. Also try to use tilling for an image, or if you want to write on a piece of paper (graphic, instead of using the entire picture cut it up make the center HTML color code and the edges images.

Some rules to Really SPEED up your web site loading speed!1.Try to limit the numbre of images2. If you can't limit the number of images, make the images .bmp or .png ect. limit the .jpg's and .jpeg's3. If your using Dreamweaver, check the default settings, because dreamweaver put in a lot of unwanted snippets to your site without even telling you.4. Make the text of your site load first and then the images! You can do this with dreamweaver5. Try to make your site look nicer with better text effects than graphic effects!Hope this helps You!!!!

let me see if I read this right

If you can't limit the number of images, make the images .bmp or .png ect. limit the .jpg's and .jpeg's

could you explain your rationelle for saying this, If you REALLY want to slow down the loading of your site, or not let it load at all in some browsers use .bmp's and stear away from the jpg's and jpeg's
Just for the sake of arguing and to make sure I havn't been mislead I decided to take a 640 x 480 image (that just so happens to be of a fish tank) and saved it once as a bmp, and once as a jpg, so I shall releate my advice if you want your site to load fast DON'T USE .BMP!!! the file was 900kb which on my fancy internet connection (dial-up) would take up to 3 minutes to load, the jpg was ~200kb which on a good day could take less then 1 minute to load.

For fast loading pages here are some tips:No Flash.No Sound.Use text links for navigation instead of buttons.Use a plain color for the background, instead of a picture.If you use icons, limit it to just one, to add emphasis to text you put it next to.No special effects on the text, like shaking around or fading in.No special effect page transitions either.Skip Javascript entirely if you can help it. I keep it turned off in my browser, and I have a high speed cable connection. I just keep it off for security reasons.Use standard fonts, instead of embedding them in the page.Optimize your HTML, there are free tools online to do that.Use CSS instead of HTML tables. Limit the number of images on the front page, preferably just a site logo. Optimize all your images. There are free tools and software for that.Resist the temptation to put a bunch of advertising banners or other ads all over the pages.

2. If you can't limit the number of images, make the images .bmp or .png ect. limit the .jpg's and .jpeg's

 

There's no way bitmaps are smaller than JPEGs. As for PNGs, it will depend if you're saving them as 8 or 24-bit. You didn't even mention .gif.

As for JPEGs, they don't have to be huge - changing the quality setting will affect their size. And you can't say that you should use any one format for all images. Each image has to be approached on its own merits. It has to be a trade-off between size and quality and sometimes the best format will be JPEG.

Try to use <div> and basic, simple HTML markup with css positioning rather than many nested tables - this can significantly speed up the page-load times. Javascript may not necessarily slow down the pageload - depends on what it's doing i.e. event listeners waiting for user events won't cause a significant overhead.Flash if used intelligently and minimally will not add significantly either - it's a super-fast streaming technology - just make sure a fallback position is used for non-Flash users.Keep images down to a minimum - use css blocks of colour for simple backgrounds, columns etc, use css styles for headers etc rather than images - and don't use overhead-costly server technologies like jsp etc unless they are necessary. - dHarry

Well it depends what is your site made from, if its made from HTML and pictures, pics will slow down your site. On the other side CSS is simple but it loads very very fast.If you have ads on your page, i mean picture adds its better to host that pictures from ads on your page, becouse they might be very slow.

well... most of the tips points to the main and biggest upload time issue - graphics. That?s true - the less images there are on the website, the faster it loads. it applies to Flash, sounds, embedded videos and so on.The reason for that is hidden in the basics of the way websites work. I hope that will let you to get a general video, what makes websites load slowly. So, when one enters address for a website, browser sends query to a server and server returns requested web page. Prior to viewing the page at users screen it has to be downloaded into its hard drive, so all images, flash animations and so on are downloaded and only then displayed. I bet you've downloaded mp3 before and how ho long it takes to get one file. that is it.Other point seems to be missing in this thread. it is code optimisation.First of all, if you use any scripting language - you have to try to make your code to do only necessary things. If you use PHP you could optimise your code with Zend or free tool TurckMMCache. These tools will precompile your php code, so when user will request php page you will save time on compiliong it in server prior to display.Secondly - you should try to use as little queries to databases as possible. Reason for that is web server and database server are separate, though they might run on the same machine. For that reason every query you make counts as connection to another server and increases unwanted load time.Hope it helped you.

let me see if I read this right could you explain your rationelle for saying this, If you REALLY want to slow down the loading of your site, or not let it load at all in some browsers use .bmp's and stear away from the jpg's and jpeg's
Just for the sake of arguing and to make sure I havn't been mislead I decided to take a 640 x 480 image (that just so happens to be of a fish tank) and saved it once as a bmp, and once as a jpg, so I shall releate my advice if you want your site to load fast DON'T USE .BMP!!! the file was 900kb which on my fancy internet connection (dial-up) would take up to 3 minutes to load, the jpg was ~200kb which on a good day could take less then 1 minute to load.

BMPs aren't really suggested. PNG works for me. Less size, but it's also a lossless image format. JPG is probably the best bet, although you risk some loss of image quality. Some programs allow you to select the JPG's artifacting rate, if I recall correctly. You can't go wrong with GIF, but make sure you have the right program to save as Graphic Interface Format, because you can risk a loss of pallette which will make the image look really weird. Also, consider making everything nice and simple, without 1,000 images loading at once on each page. Not only will it slow down the loading time, but it will kill your bandwith. If you have some images you want to show on your site for people to view that aren't directly related to the background or layout, consider using a program or just using even MSPaint to thumbnail the image in quest. CTRL+A or selecting an area, followed by CTRL+W can allow you to select how much percent smaller you want the image to be. Also, don't be afraid to use tiling background images or less colored ones with the CSS specifying how it will tile. Hopefully, this will help you out and all. On another note, forcing background music is a bad choice and will slow down the page's loading rate. If possible, try having them linked to or something like that. I hope that helps you out.