Website Optimization : Few simple bullets to speedup your website

Website optimization is the process of reducing the page load time taken by the website pages to maximize web performance. If a website takes longer to load, most people lose interest onto it and give it up. Today companies spend tons of money implementing the latest techniques in their website designs like web 2.0 technologies – AJAX, DHTML ; also multimedia, high-end graphics, etc. This might lead to a complete waste on investment if the internet visitors have to wait for more than a few seconds for the website pages to load.

With today’s fast paced world and people expectations for fast paced things, if your website is slow, your website visitors would not wait! They will move onto some other competitor. User patience is an important aspect that should be considered while designing a website or even while deciding the amount of content that would be rendered on the web page. You have only a few seconds to get compelling content onto the webpage inorder to convert your visitors into sales. If you fail to understand this then you will need to drop the idea to make profits and increase the customer database.

The solution:

HTML optimization : Websites are generally developed using WYSIWYG editors which in turn adds a lot of unwanted tags like < font>< p>etc. If you develop a layout using HTML table it will have profuse amount of < tr> and < td> tags. These tags not only increase page size but also make webpage more complex which makes it slower for the browser to render the page.

A good way forward is to totally avoid HTML and shift to Cascading Style Sheet option. It is supported by all browsers and also reduces the Page size by a considerable amount. Style sheets help in cutting down a lot of unnecessary HTML code.

Remove excess comments from HTML. Comments help in making your page easy to maintain but it also makes your page slow to load for users.

Similarly add only those effects which are needed by your site. Whenever you add Java, Java Scripts or other effects it adds up to the size of your site. So keep them limited to your requirement.

Graphic Optimization : Graphics add liveliness to the webpage but it is extremely important that they should be optimized. Resolution of web graphics should not be more than 72 dpi which is the resolution of most monitors.

Color depth determines the number of colors present in the image. It's an important factor when optimizing GIF images. Higher the number of colors, larger is the image size. But keep a check on the quality of image as well, because as you lower the color depth it reduces the quality of the image as well.

File format also matters while optimizing the image. Tiffs, BMPs, and maximum-quality JPEGs are unsuitable for the Web. Switching to a different format can make a significant difference in file size. The PNG files are smaller than the GIF at equivalent settings.

If there is any need to display the image in a bigger size. I would recommend putting a thumbnail of it on a main page and opening the larger image in a new browser window.