One of the most important features of a website is its ability to download in the minimum possible time on typical web browsers. We all know that websites are created with the intention to reach as many people as possible around the globe; however, bottlenecks like internet connection speeds that vary from country to country hamper the downloading of your website. If the website is heavy and the connection speed is slow there are chances that you may lose important visitors.

Despite how technology has transformed the way we access the internet today, the fact remains that dial up and slow broadband connections still exist. Even for those countries that have high speed connections at home or office, the number of websites running on the internet is increasing at an alarming rate. This has a direct impact on the amount of time spent by a viewer on a webpage. In today’s fast paced world if there is one thing that most people do not have, it is patience. The last thing that you would want is to start losing customers who refuse to wait for your heavy website to download on slow internet connections.

We all know that improving the internet connection speeds is out of our control, however, what is in our control is to make the website as light as possible. Here are a few tips that can help to decrease the loading time of your website regardless of the internet speed or browser it is viewed on:

1 Confine the website to light graphics and simple web design

It is observed that web pages that have far too many images embedded on them especially with animated effects generally take a lot of time to download on the browser. It makes no sense to have an attractive website if it’s going to take ages to download. Simplicity is beauty and that is why you should restrict the number of images and graphics being used on each web page. If you want to share important images the best idea is to make them part of the image gallery on your website.

2 Optimize your images

It is always a good practice to optimize each image on your web page by using image editing tools like Photoshop. Images come in a wide range of formats JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF etc. Try to save images in the most appropriate format so that they have the right kind of effect on the website. JPEG files are usually the best since they are light and also offer better quality.

3 Optimize flash files

Animation really does attract the attention of visitors however try to restrict it as far as possible. Wherever you can avoid animated GIF files since they are relatively heavy and take time to download. Instead use optimized flash files by reducing the flash loading time feature.

4 Always state image dimensions

When you place images on your web page always mention the height and width attributes within the HTML code. This enables the web browser to know the exact image size before it is even downloaded. By mentioning the size the web browser typically reserves the exact area for the image while the remaining web page downloads. This helps in reducing download time significantly.

5 Do away with useless code

It is observed that when you use HTML generator tools or applications, empty tags automatically get inserted within your website’s code. It is always best to manually check for such codes and remove them. This would allow the web browser not to spend useless time in manipulating the code while downloading the web page.

6 Use table-less website designing techniques

With websites having tables typically a web browser would have to first scan for tables and then would only download the contents of a page. This adversely increases the website download time. This is why it is always best to use CSS and div tags to reduce time to download.

7 Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS offers a great way to ensure that your site is clean and impactful. You can easily define font styles and images etc. in a different file without having to reuse the same html tags again and again for a particular web page. This also immensely impacts the download speed of the web page.

8 Avoid back ground music and restrain to minimum multimedia usage

Although background music is great to have, it takes time to download and play. The same goes with multimedia files as well. Heavy multimedia files like video clips etc. take time in streaming, downloading and playing on the web browser. It is always better to restrict the number of multimedia files on your website.

9 Use limited redirects

Redirects can also have a negative impact on the download speed of your website. Always ensure that there are no redirects and the web pages open directly.

10 Hosting on high performance servers

See if you can host your website on high end servers that offer faster connectivity. High performance servers allow faster website loading time.