Lower your website’s loading times!

If your website loads up real slow, then its obviously going to put some people off from visiting your website, and Search Engines may think twice before crawling your pages. That means its important to lower the loading times of your website, so here are some basic tips that you should follow, if you don’t already.

• Images - Don’t save your images in a BMP format whatever you do. It may be good quality, but the file size will be absolutely massive, with a normal image being over 1 megabyte. Say you had 10 BMP files to load on your website as well as the content, it would take forever to load. Save it as JPG or PNG instead, these are much smaller. Remember though, keep quality and size both in mind.
• Javascript - Don’t overuse javascript. Although you mind need some javascript in (which is fine) but when you call a lot of scripts on the same page, it tends to slow down a website dramatically. Do your best to use as least as possible. Another thing you could do is put all of the javascript code at the bottom of the webpage (but before the /body tag) so that all of your content loads up first, and the javascript afterwards.
• MySQL - Like the last tip, don’t overly use MySQL too. You shouldn’t really have to use much MySQL on your normal pages anyway (if at all) but if you do, don’t overdo it.
• Complications - Don’t over complicate your HTML or PHP coding - Keep it as short and light as possible, you don’t want to use lots of while loops in your PHP or its going to slow it down. The less code you do generally, the quicker it will load up.
• External Files - If you are going to include other files, make sure you do it locally and don’t do it for other websites. For example, if you want to load an image you found, make sure you host it yourself near where the webpage is hosted instead of directly linking it from the website. Reasons for this is, well firstly, the site might stop hotlinking so you can’t do it, but also, you’re using up their bandwidth, and it isn’t really helping your website too.
• Ads - If your webpage(s) are completely full of ads, it will definately slow it down because it has to retrieve a lot of information. One ad or maybe even two ad blocks is fine, but if you go any higher than that, you need to be careful.

So there you have it, some nice easy tips for you to follow. I recommend that you listen to these tips and then follow them to make you, your visitors and the Search Engines happy!

Stumble it!