Every web designer aims to design fast loading web pages. The reason is that web users are always in a hurry. They will go elsewhere if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
Your site visitors won’t wait a minute or more for a single page to load. According to some experts, if your home page doesn’t load within eight seconds, about a third of visitors have a chance to get frustrated and leave the website.
There are a few solutions that will make sure your site loads before users get frustrated and disappear.
Many programs add unnecessary code to their web pages. Remove unnecessary code and extra tags left behind while editing your web pages. Cascading Style Sheets can be used wherever possible. They produce clean code. A page designed with CSS can present almost the same design and information as an HTML page using one third of the amount of code.
Use graphics, scripts and Flash where necessary. Image files such as GIF and JPEG are the easiest to optimize. Be sure to optimize large files. Many third-party apps can optimize your images online. Graphic buttons should be replaced by text links. Never use images to display blocks of text.
Keep your web pages light with a limited number of images and text links so that the page loads in fractions of seconds. Take the example of the Google home page that has an image and selects a number of text links. It is a perfect example of page size and download optimization. Users will reward you with more traffic if you keep your web pages light.
You should reevaluate your site’s architecture if you’ve tried all of these tips but your download time doesn’t get under six seconds. It may be the case that you are putting too much information on each page.