How do you get a web page to load faster?

Hi,

You can install the Plugin w3 total cache if you are using Wordpress

WordPress › W3 Total Cache « WordPress Plugins

They already do.

Two biggies -

Clean up your HTML/CSS
Optimise images

You dont post any info if your using Wordpress or not.

Ways to increase loadtimes (random order):

1) Faster web hosting
2) Less images
3) Remove the big background image (if any).
4) Make all images to PNG format
5) Optimize your DB queries and php coding in general.

Decrease of image size will solve most issues, if not all.
I normally only use images for the logo (small one) and for a button or two.
Everything else is done by CSS.

Hi Richnana,

I don't know how Google awards or penalize you because of the slow loading of your website. I can only say how I deal with a site's loading speed.

If I click on a link, I do this in that hope that they don't waste my valued time unecessarily. So I don't wait longer than 10 seconds. If the site don't loads under that time, I move on.

Am I selfish? Maybe. But this is my time, I decide on how I use it.

Fortunately you got useful advices above i.e. from 101millionAds and Wide. Your interest is to pledge them.

Many successes,

Sandor

I don't know what you guys are talking about. What about if the server of the computer user on the other end is poor? I don't think Google gives credit or penalizes any Jack for the fact that a webpage doesn't load as fast as anybody thinks.

Hi Richnana,
People have given you good advice. No one really knows how Google may penalize you for slow loading times (if they do). But what is certain is that Google does know how long visitors stay on your page once they arrive. The link Ivan gave you discusses this though.

If, for example, the average visitor stays on your page for only 8 seconds on average, and a competitor's page has an average "stay time" of 48 seconds, Google will believe the competitor's site is more relevant and meaningful to the visitors who go there.

Google's main goal is to provide search users with relevant, meaningful content. Without that, it's AdSense and AdWords programs would fail. So one key, obviously is to keep visitors on your page as long as possible to make "G" believes your content is relevant to the search terms used to find it.

There are a lot of tools to help you. One good one is at netmechanic.com, specifically at: HTML code help, search engine optimization and web site maintenance tools by NetMechanic..

You can enter your URL and it will give you the load times at various connection speeds. It will also give you the load times of your images and recommend which ones should be more optimized. They even have a tool that will show you how your images will look at different resolutions. You can then click on one of your images and the tool will downgrade the resolution to the quality you select and send you the new image file to upload to your site.

Also remember that when you are looking at your site on your own computer, the images have likely been cached by your browser. Images load faster from your cache than from the network. So while your page may load quickly from your own computer, users arriving there for the first time may experience slower loading times. I would clear your browser cache before checking your site.

I've found the tool above to be handy. It's a free tool, but it will only check 5 pages for you--then you have to upgrade to the paid version. Still, it's pretty useful. Good luck. --Mike

If you want to get your webpage to load faster, apart from optimizing your website properly(using gif images, keeping all graphical user elements to a minimum etc)

You also need to use dedicated hosting such as a virtual private server, that way, the server resources aren't being divided by 20,000 other sites on the server, resulting in slower loading times.

If you would like to do some loading speed tests, the following websites are handy;

Web Page Analyzer - free website optimization tool website speed test check website performance report from web site optimization

Pingdom Tools


Chris

Go to this link: The W3C Markup Validation Service and fix your errors. If you have 2 much errors, Google or any other SE bots will not like your website unless you have some pretty heavy backlinks.

Then think about the page loading time.

First off if your website is image based then make sure you save all of your images for web. I use photoshop to resize my images for web. Use common fonts and try not to have large files everywhere on your website.

Richnana I have not seen your site so there for I could not tell if it has huge amount of graphics and designs. If your site has big banners and to many flash, animated attachments for sure it will load slow. And also your connection to the internet can also be another cause for slow or even a page cannot be displayed error.

Unless your site loads incredibly slowly (like 50k modem slowly) and is unreliable (ie lots of downtime) then don't worry about it, Google is not gonna go near you with any sort of penalty.

One way to see how you can optimise is to load firebug for firefox, then select the net tab and enabled, then you can see download times for everything on your page.