Page Load Time - Tips For Improving Your Site Speed to Keep Visitors and Search Engines Happy

The faster your website loads, the better the visitor's experience will be. In Google's efforts to improve their customer's experience (surfers), they recently implemented a change that added the page load time as a factor of where your site will be positioned in their search engines.

While this does not carry a huge amount of sway, according to Google itself who stated that "if two sites are vying for the same position in the SERP, the site with the faster load time will be placed higher". That being said, although your site cannot get to the number one position on page load time alone, it can give you the edge over your competition if there is a tight race for that coveted position.

Search engines aside, a fast loading page is just plain good for business. I am sure you have run into the site that takes forever to completely load and realize just how frustrating it is. You either hit the back button and search for an alternative or you sit and curse while you wait. Either way, it does not leave a good first impression on your site visitors. It is even more frustrating if every single page of the site takes equally as long to load.

Here are a few tips to optimise your site and make a web page load faster:

1. CSS stylesheets. Use a single stylesheet rather than multiples. One large stylesheet will load faster than 2 or 3 smaller ones. Use CSS for site-wide styling of your website rather than HTML.
2. Keep graphics to a minimal. Images and graphics are much larger files than text and take much longer to load. If you must use graphics, make sure you specify the height and width in your image code. This will allow the browser to use those dimensions as place holders and allow the rest of the page to load at the same time as the images. If you do not specify the dimensions, the browser will have to wait for the image to fully load before going on to load the rest of the page contents.
3. Re-size and optimise all images and graphics. Do not use code to shrink images down to the size you want to display. By editing the images in an image editor to the proper size you need, you will decrease the file size of the image and decrease the load time. Whenever possible, use.gif or.png rather than jpeg. Jpegs have a larger colour pallet and therefore are larger files. You should only use jpgs for photos where true colour is necessary.
4. Keep videos and the bulk of your images to the bottom of the page. This will allow the majority of your page to load quickly and keep the larger, slower loading files to be loaded last. This improves your visitor experience because they have info and text to read while they are waiting for other items to load.
5. Avoid the "bells and whistles". While scripts, flash and plugins are cool and sometimes do have a certain function, they can also drastically slow down your page load time. Only use scripts or plugins that are absolutely necessary to the function of your site. Although you may think all of the popups, floating ads, Tweetme buttons and special effects are super-cool, your visitors will not be as impressed as you are. The truth is that most visitors absolutely hate these things and often will leave pages that use them just because they find them annoying.
6. Use CSS/HTML navigation. You should avoid flash and javascript navigation bars and buttons. Those are like small bits of software, are not search engine friendly and take a longer time to load. Since most navigation is located at the top of the page, these items can severely hamper the load speed of your site.
7. Use hex codes for colour blocks and backgrounds rather than images. If you are using coloured backgrounds for your website, tables or CSS blocks, hex colour codes load very quickly while images take much longer to load. This is particularly good for solid coloured headers, sidebars, etc.
8. Always upload images to your own web host. You should avoid hot-linking to any image on a third party server. Always upload the image to your own server first. Images hosted outside your own domain name will take much longer to load than images hosted within your own domain.

What I have found from experience is that often the simplest sites are the sites that perform the best. They convert visitors into buyers and they keep your visitors coming back for more. Forget about the need to make your site fancy. That is only your own ego talking and not the needs of your customers and clients. Truth be told, your customers appreciate a well planned and well laid out site more than a flashy, cutting edge piece of design. Remember, they are there to buy, not to be in awe of the decor.

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