Saturday, September 24, 2011

Taking Effective Steps to Decrease Page Load Times

By Steve Hawkins


It is just a simple fact that if you are trying to do too much on your site, or it is under-optimized for some things, then your page loading time may suffer. Everybody in the world does not have high-speed internet access; however, a significant portion of online users do have it. The internet has forced companies to respond to the wishes and demands of consumers. How you approach making your site loading times low is contingent upon what you are doing with your sites. If your site is taking upwards of five seconds or worse, more than that, then you have to do something like, yesterday, to bring that down.

Blog owners who know what they're doing will probably not have any issues with their database - but you could which could contribute to the problem. Too many plugins can slow down your blog, but if you are all right there, then investigate your db. Deleting outdated or old tables in your blog database, which is located in your host account under PHP myadmin, will make things run faster. Optimizing the tables is something that can also be done, but if you are not familiar we recommend you learn about it or hire somebody to do it. Bear in mind that this really pertains to older blogs that have been through a lot over the years. There is no reason to be afraid to tackle these things; so just get some knowledge about it and always back-up, first.

It doesn't make sense to repeat the same information on your website's numerous pages over and over again, does it? All you need to do is create CSS and JavaScript externally then just repeat as needed across the many pages of your website. When you're hosting your content elsewhere, you won't have to clog up the single, individual pages and their HTML code. As soon as the data is cached by your visitor, it can then be loaded elsewhere too, more quickly. This helps you increase the overall speed of your website. For example, if you're running a 100 page content site you'll save on your loading times by using this one tip.

We all know that it's important to use a robust tracking script on a website to understand where the traffic is coming from and to learn about visitor behavior. However, a mistake that many webmasters and bloggers make is they use a number of tracking scripts, when only one is more than enough. This does nothing good for your site and can bring down the loading speed of your site.

For example, if you're using Google Analytics then just stick to it and remove the rest of them. All in all, increasing the loading speed of your website will help you in more than one way. Your visitors will not only be able to stay back, but they'll also keep coming back for more knowing that they won't have to play the waiting game. As a webmaster or blogger, you should understand the pulse of your visitors and focus on giving them the best possible experience. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and implement these tips on your website to improve the page load time.




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