Optimize Your Website
One of the most important aspects in affecting usability is load times. Generally, most internet users will merely click the back button if your website takes to long to load. This in turn notifies Google that they bounced off your page, negatively affecting your search rankings. There are many tips you can employ to “speed” up your websites, and these are easy to do and take only minutes of your time. Don’t be pig headed and think everyone is on broadband, if your server is battling with demand, it’s going to display your website slowly no matter how fast your users connection is.
Optimize Images
I’ve noticed many websites are starting to neglect optimizing their images. Take time to make sure you shrink your image file size down to the maximum possible before the quality goes awry. This may be increasing the JPG compression, or lowering the amount of colors used in your GIF’s and PNG’s.
Image Formats
Make sure that you are using the correct image format! Jpegs are generally meant for photographs, GIF’s and PNG’s are meant for “flatter” images such as clipart and illustrations. Most browsers can now days display PNG’s correctly, unless you take considering your alpha transparency on 32bit PNG’s. Use them instead of GIF’s where possible as they are smaller.
Resize Your Images
Nothing irritates a web designer more than images resized by the browser! This is pure laziness! Make sure that your original image is resized correctly, preventing that blocky appearance in most browsers, your pages will also load much quicker.
Trailing Slash on Links
This ones very simple, use a slash on the end of your links. This prevents the server from having to figure out what the page is and let it automatically assume that it is a directory page. Every bit helps.
Height and Width Tags
As mentioned above, this is often abused by people to resize their images. These tags should only be used to display the images actual width and height! This helps the browser load the page without the content shifting all over the place as the images load. Your page will also respond more quickly as the browser has to do less work.
Reduce HTTP Requests
When loading a webpage, every object be it images, HTML files, Javascript a request is made to the server. If many objects are required this can add a good couple of seconds of load time to your website, slowing it down significantly. One way to reduce this is to combine your files as much as possible, placing your CSS in separate files may help structure your site nicely, but it doesn’t help with load times. Same with Javascript, place all of it in one file. There was a trend in slicing up images, to make it appear that a website was loading quicker, it didn’t really work. The new trend now is sprites, and combining your images into one and using CSS to display only part of the image you wish. This works great for buttons with rollover affects as there’s no delay.
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