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Load Time Tip:
Put Your Pages On A Diet
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
Keynote NetMechanic
January is a time of year when many people make resolutions to change their personal behavior. Exercise more, eat healthier, or go on a diet are popular goals. Perhaps your Web site could benefit too. Do your part to mitigate the "world wide wait" problem by creating slim pages that download quickly.
Causes Of Page Bloat
All visitors, even those with broadband connections, are sensitive to page download time. We all know it because we all use the Internet and regularly snarl about slow pages. But still, every Web designer has been guilty of creating bloated pages.
It's easy to do because you have so many opportunities!
- Graphic images: Images are often the single most important factor that determines page download time. Too many images or images with a large file size slow your pages considerably.
- Multimedia effects: Multimedia is a close cousin to basic image files, but these files are usually far more complex and much larger than your average JPEG or GIF file.
- WYSIWYG editors tend to write HTML code that is larger and much more complex than code you'd write by hand.
- HTML formatting instead of style sheets: When you rely on FONT tags and attributes to control text formatting, the code size adds up in a hurry because you have to apply formatting to each individual page element. This bloats your file size and leads to nesting errors and other HTML mistakes.
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Each component by itself may not make that much of a difference. But think about what happens when you combine two or more on a single page!
Identify And Rank Slow Pages
But it's never too late to speed up existing pages.
Use HTML Toolbox to determine the download time of your Web pages. That's a quick way to identify the pages that have the most serious problems, but don't automatically tackle the slowest pages first! Concentrate on your most important pages - like your home page.
Study your server logs to find the pages that visitors are most likely to view. Many will start at your home page. When you deep submit important internal pages, visitors may enter several levels deep in the site, but their second stop is often the home page.
The home page sets the tone for the rest of the site so be sure it has a fast and reliable download.
5 Steps To Slimmer Pages
Now that you've located the problem pages and ranked them in order of importance, it's time to put them on a diet.
- Use GIFBot to optimize your image files - it's free and easy to use. You can decrease image file size by 50% or more with little or no loss in image quality. Some users with many large graphic images have used GIFBot to reduce page load time by more than a 90 seconds. Think how many visitors you could lose with an extra 90 seconds of page load time!
- Be careful with multimedia. Flash animations, audio and video files can be very effective. Some visitors love them, but they may cause problems for visitors with disabilities and visitors with dial-up connections. Try to give visitors a choice if you have large multimedia files. Some may want to view the Flash animation while others might prefer to skip it and go directly to your other content.
- Understand HTML coding - Invest in a good HTML book and learn the basics so that you aren't completely dependent on your WYSIWYG editor. An editor can be a great time-saving way to put pages together quickly, but don't rely on one completely for every site function. That's giving up way too much control over your design - and the size and format of your underlying code.
Even with the best editor, there will be a time when you have to look at the code yourself to find and fix problems. That may be because you need to do something the editor doesn't support or that the editor has caused an error (like including browser-specific code). Use the "save as Web page" option in Microsoft Word very sparingly - if at all.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Format text and other page elements with style sheets instead of FONT tags and other HTML techniques. You'll be surprised at how much easier your page is to maintain without all the extra formatting information cluttering up your code. Less HTML code means smaller files, less maintenance, and fewer chances for error.
- Use external files. Even the CSS formatting information can take up space in your document's HEAD section though. Throw in some JavaScript functions and you soon have a HEAD section almost as big as the BODY section. So consider using external files to reduce the size. Separate the CSS instructions into an external CSS file and move the JavaScript functions into one or more JavaScript files.
External files are a great way to reduce document size and create reusable code for the entire Web site.
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All these options help you create pages that download quickly and are easier to maintain.
Server Solutions - And Problems
If your pages are still huge, investigate some of the many HTML compression programs available. These compress your code by removing line breaks, extra spaces, etc. Some claim a 70-80% reduction in code size. Just make sure that you can restore the page to its original condition before you try to edit it!
There are also some server-side solutions available for file compression. The mod_gzip module is popular for Apache servers and XCompress works with IIS servers. However, to implement either one, you need access to your server or a helpful Web host who will install it for you.
If it seems as though every page in your site is slow, the problem might be with your server instead of your page design! Run a quick test with NetMechanic's Server Check tool to see how quickly your server responds to requests - and how often it's down entirely!
A search engine spider can be just as impatient as a human visitor. If your server is down or responds slowly to page requests, it could be sabotaging your promotion efforts. Think about it: you waited months for the spider to visit and when it does, it can't evaluate your content!
A good design gets visitors interested initially, but good content that loads quickly is what keeps them on your site longer. All the time and effort you put into site promotion will be wasted if your pages download so slowly that visitors get bored and leave.
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