subject: Loading Times And Your Website [print this page] Loading Times And Your Website Loading Times And Your Website
Why does speed matter when talking about how fast your website loads? Get this by increasing your loading time on your website you can drastically increase the bounce rate, accessibility, and even rank in the search engines. We do live in a digital age and with the digital age comes people hopping aboard the information super highway (the internet) and in turn looking for information that they can access quickly. However, it would be detrimental to your website if your loading time exceeds 5 seconds or more. So you are probably wondering, what can I do to insure that my website has a quick loading time? In this article I will be talking about ways in which you can increase your loading time drastically.
Wordpress Sites
Chances are if you are running a Wordpress site or blog you can be kicking yourself in the foot if you have too many plugins or widgets installed at once. In fact, if you try to keep the limit to 5-8 plugins you should be fine. I have worked on websites before and reduced the amount of plugins installed on the site down to a respectable amount and really noticed a huge impact on the loading time. Also, some of the plugins you can install will conflict with each other which can throw out various error messages or cause your site to be completely inaccessible.
Optimizing your Images
Another vital aspect to your sites loading time can be how large your image files are. Try to keep these to a minimal amount, such as 20 KB. I always use Photoshop to optimize my graphics without sacrificing the image quality. You can reduce your files by half the size at times before you notice the quality is greatly reduced. Prior to optimizing your graphics you will notice that your site will load much quicker.
Bells and Whistles
Flash looks great and is very interactive. However, I commonly see people over do it with their Flash. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you need to do it. In fact, if your site takes minutes to load you might want to think about skipping out on some of the fancy Flash or consider not implementing your site with all Flash. Even consider having the site done in two different formats so that the user can pick whether or not they want to view the Flash version or HTML version.
Next, Javascript can be very functional for a website, but overdoing it can really hurt your loading time, as well. Just like Flash it is a good idea to not overdo your site with Javascript. A more practical way to design your site is by using CSS stylesheets. These take a lot less time to load and are much more practical for your website. You can even make simple changes and it will make changes on your site in a global scale. CSS stylesheets are very dynamic to work with.
