The Internet has bought many changes to our society. Instant gratification is the need of the hour. Slow page loads are harmful to our online success since people do not have the patience to wait for a slow page to open. There are several causes for slow page loads. Here are some tips for making your websites load faster.
Pay Attention to Image Weight
Heavy images are a main source of slow page loads. Those who take digital photos for printing require images with a high resolution. Resolution refers to the amount of detail that an image has. The higher resolution of the image the more detailed it is. High resolution is not needed for good screen images. While 600 Dots per Inch or higher is the standard for print resolution; screen resolution of 72 DPI works fine. When we get digital images from a camera or from a stock image site we must pay attention to the resolution. They should still be kept as small as possible. Many new designers are not aware of these things and end up loading a page with heavy images.
Make Proper Use of CSS
In the recent past web pages were stylized by a lot of inline tags. Every paragraph and every table used tags to style font, font color, font size and so forth. This was the nature of web design before HTML 4. This cleans up a web page tremendously. Every paragraph does not need 20 to 70 characters to mark it for its style. The repetition and clutter diminish with the use of the style sheet. It is also easier to change the styles of sections of your page since the change happens once on the style sheet and shows up throughout the website. Most WYSIWYG software has eliminated the use of HTML 3 and its huge markup. Make sure that you have switched over to the use of Cascading Style Sheets as this will decrease load time greatly.
Another important thing to keep in mind is to consolidate style sheets. If you consolidate style sheets you can save load time. You can copy and paste all styles into one style sheet for a static web page. This will save some load time. Content Management Systems like Drupal have many style sheets. Caching is a tool that helps with this problem. Many CMS systems including Drupal, Joomla and WordPress allow for page caching. The Caching system stores a copy of the web pages recently accessed. This speeds up the page load time a great deal. The down side is that a webmaster updating the site must clear the cache or he will see the older saved version. When members make posts they may not show up immediately due to caching.