Many sites have images or graphics that are too large. By too large, I do not necessarily mean the dimensions of images, but the file size is excessive and does not load quickly in a Web browser. There are no fixed rules about file sizes, but if the website does not load in a few seconds most visitors will move on to another site. Have a qualified web designer check out the website and make sure there is not an abundance of large images can slow down your site. You can reduce image size by reducing quality, for example, for a self-compressed image will still display fine for internet.
Another issue is flash animation. While animation can add a nice dimension to your website, it can slow down the speed of your website, and sometimes just become tiresome if over used. Once your visitors have seen the anima
tion a few times, they will probably not want to wait every time while it plays again. Animation if used sparingly and with taste can enhance a website without bogging it down, but more and more websites that once had intro flash pages are to remove them. Excessive we of Flash can also decrease your search engine rankings.
Web page code:
Check your code and make sure that it is effective and well written. If you have comments in your code, so take them out. Just reducing the code bloat of your site can save a few Kb each time your page is available - and given a site gets thousands of hits a day, it could save you a lot of money in bandwidth charges.
CSS and Caching:
Having your web page style information in an external file can improve performance since CSS style sheets are cached when they first opened. Therefore, when a visitor goes to different pages on your site, any CSS style sheets, which have already been accessed will remain in the cache. CSS is also a good way to limit the amount of HTML code by separating code from content. Any style information can be declared in one place, but used throughout your site.
Links:
Make sure all links on your web pages is valid. So if you link to other websites on external websites, make sure that the pages still exist. Occasionally page names change on external sites, which can cause links to become invalid. This is also a disadvantage as far as search engines. Search engines check for links and if there are bad link, they may penalize your site. Of course links to internal pages on your site must be valid as well. So if you add and remove Web pages on your site, ensure that all links to these pages be accurate.
Hosting:
If your site is still slow after cleaning of your HTML code, trimming back the size of your images, graphics and animation, you can judge the quality of your webhost. I can not recommend free hosting. You need reliability and accountability of the website hosting and free hosting providers usually have servers that are overly taxed, and lacking the necessary resources.
Design:
Some websites are beautifully designed with lots of graphics, but if your visitors can not quickly and easily navigate your site, what's the point? Remember the goal of your website. Is it to sell a product or a service that provides information, it is to dazzle the visitor with animation and web design skills. I have found that the most successful websites inform, provide an important message, or sell a product safely, securely and efficiently.
