Optimizing for the Busy Browser

Nowadays many people are not very patient, especially when sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for a selected page to load. In order to minimize customer frustration and to ensure that visitors don't turn elsewhere in the interim, we need to do all what can to create quick loading pages.

A page that is too large or heavy will obviously take time to open. A page with a lot of content is heavier than a less informative page. Keeping page size to at most about 30 KB (including images) will probably make for a shorter loading period. A page measuring 30 KB is pretty large and will take a bit of time though not too much, to load. 50 percent of web pages fall into this category too! Less KB will obviously load quicker. Images themselves shouldn't be larger than 10 KB. This can be hard to achieve especially with cool, animated images, but if it can be done you will have great and quick loading images.

Switching from a table-based website to cascading style sheets (CSS) is a great way to minimize excessive code which causes loading time to be greatly reduced and offers wonderful SEO benefits too! The CSS formatting can greatly reduce the need for excessive images.

Interestingly enough placement on a page matters! Putting CSS at the top of the page rather than further down will give the appearance that the page is loading quicker. In the same vein, placing JavaScript towards the bottom of the page compels the reader to first render content above it before calling the script. It makes a lot more sense to render the visual content before the interactive content...

Consider splitting a page with a large amount of content into a couple of pages. This will decrease download time and create a more organized site. It will be easier for browsers to pinpoint the information they want and be able to go back and retrieve it. Its much easier to remember page 3 of 4 than remembering to scroll down til the approximate 3/4 mark...

Many pages host advertisements for other sites. Some of these ads are served from a Web server different from the server of the web page it is displayed on. If the ad's server is slow or disabled it will affect the loading speed of the display page. This applies to images too that are served from different servers than the page it is viewed on.

Another point to check out is you site's own server. If you optimized your page as light as possible and kept your page size to the minimum and yet you still are having difficulty with the loading time it may be a server problem. If your server is getting more hits than it can handle it may be time for an upgrade.

Quick loading pages are a must for every site developer. It is the first step in creating a user friendly site. If you want to keep your users you need them to get past the initial loading. The only way to do this is by optimizing your pages to load up at a decent speed.