| How To Make Your Web Pages Load Faster |
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Ron Erdos 
The longest you should have to make potential customers wait for a web page to load is ten seconds. Otherwise, you risk sending them to your competitors. Here are four tips to make your web pages load faster. 1. Use small ‘thumbnail’ images (images less than, say, 10 KB in size) which the user can click on to see a larger image. This way you are giving your visitor the choice of which images they are willing to wait for, and which ones they are happy to see in thumbnail-view. 2. Put large images ‘below the fold’. In newspaper-speak, ‘below the fold’ refers to any content below the point where readers fold their newspaper. On the web, the area ‘below the fold’ is that part of the web page you have to scroll down to get to). If you put your images ‘below the fold’ then it can load while your visitors are reading the first few paragraphs of your text. By the time they scroll down to read the rest of your article, your image will have loaded. Boredom factor: zero. 3. Try to keep each individual web page (not your website) under 100 KB in size. Also try to keep each image under 10 KB in size. What you don't want is a 300 KB Godzilla of a web page kill your visitors with boredom while they wait for it to load. (In fact, most people won’t wait - they will visit your competitor instead). 4. Strictly speaking, this next tip will not make your web pages load faster. However, it will allow your readers to begin reading your content before all the images have loaded. This creates the perception of your web pages as fast-loading. Here’s the tip. Make sure each of your images has a height and a width tag. I’ll explain how to do this in a second. The benefit of ensuring each of your images has a height and a width tag is that all the text will load into the correct spot on the page straight away. This means that the reader can begin reading immediately. If you leave out height and width tags, the text may ‘jump’ out of the way when the image loads. You may have seen this effect on other web pages, or even your own. Here’s how to specify a height and a width tag for each of your images. This will get a bit ‘techy’, but if you don’t understand it, have your webmaster read it and apply it for you.
Instead of simply specifying an image, such as <img src=“logo.gif”>, specify it as <img src=“logo.gif” width=“600” height=“80”>. This tells the web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox) that the logo is 600 pixels wide and 80 pixels high. The browser then knows how much space to leave for the image, before it has even loaded. This makes the text easier to read, as it doesn’t ‘jump’ out of the way when the image loads. While it may be too much to apply all of these steps in one go, why not pick one and apply it straight away. Could fast-loading web pages be your competitive advantage on the web? What do you think about this article? Discuss it in the Enedia Web Marketing Forum. |
