Last updated on May 3rd, 2024 at 08:38 pm
The recent Google announcement that they were officially adding a new signal to their search ranking algorithms to take account of site speed (Google blog) prompted me to write these few tips about getting your page to load as quickly as possible.
There are many things you can do to speed up a page, these range from the purely technical that you may or may not be able to implement through to much more simple options.
Images
File size and resolution – Do you have images on your page? I once looked at a site for a prospective client that had a photo of a boat on the home page, the image looked nice but when I looked at the image properties the file was 4 Mb in size – the client’s designer had taken a digital photograph, placed in on the page and resized it. By taking the photo into a graphics editor, changing the resolution to 72dpi (dots per inch) (most monitors display at 72 or 96dpi while printers work at 300dpi) and resizing the image in the editor we reduced the file size down to a much more reasonable 120Kb. This means that the image took only 3% of the time that the original image took to download.
HTML code
Whitespace – If you write your own code have a look at the number of blank lines and amount of whitespace in the code – I often work on pages that have multiple spaces between words (normally as a result of someone that has copy and pasted from a word document). Removing the extra whitespace can reduce the amount to time taken to send the code from your server to the browser. This is often only 1 or 2Kb of data but every little bit helps.
Extra code – If you are copying and pasting from some word processors or programs like MS Publisher (yes some people design their web pages in publisher and send them to us to build) there is often lots of extra code embedded in the page. Removing this can take some time and effort but can produce a good saving in file size.
Extra code (unwanted html) – older pages and pages that have been put together in a graphics html editor can often have unwanted spans, divs, font changes etc. These often are opened and immediately closed and if they are not needed for page layouts (some layouts use empty divs) they they can be removed to once again save space.
Styles – If you are using styles on your pages try to put the common ones into a style sheet and only embed those styles that will be used once and only on that page.
Styles CSS files – The same thing applies to CSS files as to webpages where whitespace is concerned – I have worked on style sheets where the creator has used 20 or 30 blank lines between sections, this resulted is a style sheet that was both unreadable and extremely large.
All of these are simple ways to improve the speed of your page and, as a by product, reduce the band width that your site uses when sending the pages to visitors.
More technical ways of speeding up your web pages will be in another article – but at least the tips above will give you a good start.