Basic ways to speed up your website

[Rezo]

Speed is certainly one of the most important factors when it comes to making a successful web site. These days’ people have high expectations, they expect a web site to load as fast as an application on their operating system, and therefore even a few seconds of waiting can frustrate them or leave altogether.

A good website should take about 8-12 seconds (for a 56K) to load. The website owner is going to have to decide how fast its pages are going to be, for example for a multimedia or a flash site they can afford to be a bit slower than others provided that the users know the nature of the site.

Ways to speed up your website

HTML issues:

- Use CSS where possible: Because pages with stylesheets load faster than those web sites designed with font tags and tables, and also it's much faster and easier to make changes.

- Stay clear of nested tables: Nested tables are basically tables within tables, but too many of theses can really slow down the browser. When a page loads the browser starts from the top and goes down in a consecutive manner, with nested tables it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing.

- Specifying height and width: For tables and images it's a good idea to specify their height and width, as it helps out the browser and therefore speeds up the process.






Thanks,
Rezo

[DotZero]

Correct me if i am wrong, but all those points probably don't make the page load any faster from start to finish, I think they just help the browser out, and make the site readable while it is still loading (eg, everything in the right place, just waiting for image).

All valid points though, anything that helps the user.

[Rezo]

Well yes, you're pretty right.

[vangogh]

I think they'll all help the site load faster. Maybe not a huge amount, but they can all help. For the most part the main thing to help speed up a site is reducing the number and size of your images. It's also a good idea to minimize requests to the server.

Far too many sites use images where a line of two of code can show the same thing. Things like solid color background images. Much of the trick is in the site design and knowing what you can and can't do with the code.

So many sites also fail to optimize their images in general. Often simply optimizing an image through phooshop (or any other image editing program) can shave 2/3 of the file size off an image. I've reduced load times on sites by 30 seconds or more just by optimizing images.

WebSiteOptimization.com
is a great site with lot's of helpful pointers to speed up sites.

Even things as simple as reducing white space in your code can shave a few seconds off download times.

[DaveyBoy]

8 - 12 seconds on dial-up isn't realistic is this day and age though.

If you are still on dial-up, you make allowances as you know most sites are going to be created for at least a 512kbps connection.

Even things as simple as reducing white space in your code can shave a few seconds off download times.

Is this true though? I always thought browsers automatically skipped these white spaces when rendering.

[JamieJelly]

your download speed isnt determined by what it is downloading but by how much there is of it. Bandwidth certainly doesn't discriminate between inline styles and external stylesheets.

Real ways of speeding up your site are -
-use common classes for your CSS, thereby reducing the amount of styling code needed
-optimise your images properly and choose the right format
-don't include entire javascript libraries (prototype weighs in at 30k!), just pick the functions you use and place in a common.js file
-if your site uses a lot of js, use a code cruncher to remove whitespace and comments

A browser might ignore whitespace but it still needs to download the data

[sim]

for php and other scripting languages all calculations should be done on seperate lines.

for ex:

$num = (3 - 2) * 3
should be
$num = 3 - 2;
$num = $num * 3;

not much of a difference but is faster =)

[cloudtrance]

Client side cache can be a very useful ally


Repeating images like logos,headers,footers, menu bars dont have to be downloaded twice. The browser recognizes the file name and pulls it straight from the cache. And even if your site uses different header graphics that differ minutely, break the images so that repeating portions are pulled from the cache.

It sure does make a big difference....


Cheers,
Cloudtrance.

[adam-s]

When possible avoid pulling ad banners from other sites and cache stuff like news feeds or xml data from other sites. Minimize querys to databases on each page. Make sure your databases are well optimized.

Make sure any server side scripting is well optimized. It might seem fast now but when a site starts getting more visitors and crawlers a poorly optimized site can really eat server resources up quick. When your server starts feeling the heat your site will slow waaaay down.

Avoid lousy web hosting like the plague.