Three Tips for Reducing Page Load Times

Web Site Optimization does not need to be difficult. Here are the easiest tips for speeding up your page load times:

Reduce Image Size

Running your images through a reduction mechanism, perhaps the ones included in fireworks or photoshop are the easiest. This in and of itself is the simplest and most effective page load time reduction mechanism. If you can, get your images to under 1160 bytes, and if not, to the closest multiple of 1160.

Combine CSS and Javascript files

If you include more than one javascript or CSS file in a page, combine those scripts into a single file. (one file each for javascript and CSS). You want to keep the number of objects to a minimum unless you have a very good reason for not doing so (such as taking advantage of pipelining).

Compress CSS and Javascript files

Run your CSS and Javascript files through a compression utility. Doing so can reduce the load factor of these files sometimes by up to 50%, even more in extreme cases

Beyond these tips, have a look through my web site optimization category page linked at the left. Using GZip compression is another big one, although it's not always easy to implement. Applying the proper cache control tags and expiration tags is another tip that isn't always easy to implement, but can dramatically reduce your server load.

Very high traffic sites will go to further extremes, applying various html compression techniques by reducing the use of quotes, usage of tags, using shortcuts, etc. that can have a big impact on the bandwidth and server resources in heavy traffic environments, but things like that will not have a major impact on low traffic sites. If you think about it, a reduction in file size of 100 bytes on a site receiving a million page views a day can save nearly 34 Gigabytes of bandwidth a year, but on low traffic sites, those 100 bytes will go entirely unnoticed in the bandwidth bill.