How to optimize Website load time

[Abbie]

I have a windows xp pc at home on which my younger bro use to work on internet for 5 to 6 hours daily. The problem is the website takes long time to load now. First it was fine when we were at high speed internet but since we are on dial up connection it is very slow. So is there any way to optimize the speed of website loading time ? Please help us.

[Techno01]

The load time of websites is one of the most important factors affecting its usability. Most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds.80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.

So the very first way to speed up your Website loading time is by reducing HTTP requests. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. When opening a web page every object will require a round trip to the server. If your site is loading 10 items, regardless of whether they are stylesheets, images or scripts, that equates to 2 seconds in latency alone. Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.If you have a portion on your site with many images within it, such as your footer, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests with image maps. If you are using K2, you can get rid on one extra HTTP request by using one stylesheet, style.css, and no schemes.

[deveritt]

You can also use CSS for the same job. CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time. CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests.Even if you decide to use tables, CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time! With your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. Combine your background images into a single image and use the CSS background-image and background-position properties to display the desired image segment.Also it cuts down on long drawn out tags and replaces them with smaller class styles instead.You can use CleanCSS to merge similar selectors, remove useless properties and remove the whitespace from your code.

[Shikhar]

You can also try to make the javascript file smaller itself. The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname.There are lots of utilities to “crunch” your files by removing whitespace and comments. Also set the browser’s cache expiration. This can be easily done using PHP in order to send some headers. If you do use a wysiwyg editor, most times the will add useless code to your pages for example, many will leave empty tags (ie. <font> </font>). Removing any of those excess tags will not only speed up your load time, but make you pages validate a lot cleaner.