Another trick is to play with the different options regarding caching your pages and blog posts. This can dramatically reduce page load times.

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Great Tips. There are so many things that people use on their sites because they look cool and flashy but they do not realize that it slows down their site drastically. Nice Post.

This is great advice. I pay a lot of attention to my load times. Very often I will put a new widget on my blog and not notice that it takes forever to load. I think that this really hurts a blog. Paying attention to load times is very important.

This post needs to be read by every single webmaster on the planet!…lol. Seriously though, if more webmasters would take the time to “trim the fat” off there webpages, it would make a huge difference on how fast there pages load. Especially simple things like using external javascript files. Why isn’t something like that not used by everyone?

And also, as you mentioned, those people who build there entire website using flash. In most cases it makes no sense mainly because search engine spiders can’t read it (except for Google of course…)

I also use a few other tools to help optimize and diagnose bloated pages.

http://valet.seoconsultants.com/

I also recommend looking at various tools that will access your site from other physical locations and test the connection there. My websites target worldwide audiences and I use some of those tools to identify load times for visitors in various countries, I even changed web hosting providers once due to a bad connection to one region of the world.

Pingdom is great software, and you can download a free trial and test your site out. My blog is way too slow to load, but I think people expect blogs to be a little slower to load with all the stuff people have on them…at least that my excuse.

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Alot of these resources that you and the other readers have spoken about are great for webmasters. For those who are looking for an internet based alternative one great page loader speed test is at tools.pingdom.com

Great post on how to speed up website load. Not many people know that a great site is not all graphics or flash. If the site loads slow most people will just leave. The hosting provider usualy uses t1 lines so most hosts are fast but get slowed down when people have flash and graphics that take up alot of transfer.

Like post about flash websites being bad i think i have to link to it so some people can read that one.

Thanks for the tips – I have been trying to keep those load times down, and for the most part seem to be doing pretty well. For example, I have reduced file sizes of images by resizing/resampling, implemented a general policy of placing videos below the fold (keeping them off the home page), and reduced the number of posts displayed on the home page from 25 to 15. I am also trying to limit the sidebar widgets to a reasonable number.

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From an SEO perspective, cutting out the fat on your site is a huge plus. Load times are killer and reducing load time has been rumored to be factored into the Google algo for rankings.

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What is the maximum load time that you would recommend?

By the way, I think most visitors don’t like flash stuff anyway.

4 seconds seems to be the magic number for load times. If your site doesn’t load for the visitor within 4 seconds, then they start losing interest.

I would also recommend this online free tool: http://Site-Perf.com/

It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart – so you can easily spot bottlenecks.

Also very useful thing is that this tool is able to verify network quality of your server (packet loss level and ping delays).

Interesting looking site/tools there Zuborg, the network quality is an interesting stat that you don’t usually see. Are you using the Pingdom API for the reports?

Of course no, all tools on site-perf.com are developed by my own from scratch

Thanks for the tips and the tools…
I just hate websites that have flash on their homepage or as an intro. I tend to zap away rather than wait for the page to load.
Any idea on which hosting providers are the best as far as fast loading is concerned?

There are too many factors for me to recommend 1 host for every situation, but what it really comes down to is what type of web hosting (shared, vps, dedicated) and where the host is located in relation to your audience (US host with Asia visitors could be a problem).

I personally use Dreamhost’s shared hosting and have found it reasonably fast for an extemely low price. I also use a LiquidWeb VPS for mission critical sites and applications. I’ve also had good experiences with hostgator and InnoHosting.

There are a few other hosts that I use but I have found them to be nothing special, although not really horrible either (1&1, GoDaddy, 100Webspace).

Thanks for that Jon. I use Hostgator but the free Web CEO tool gives my website a rating of 3 to 4 (Fair), yet using the above tools, my website loads within the 4 second mark. Not sure what this means and why the rating isn’t great.

Yea most shared hosts will get you a rating of around 4 because you’re dealing with the delays of 1 server running multiple sites simultaneously. For the most part you should be just fine as long as your site loads within the 4 second mark, and if your site starts to grow you can always move up to a better server to keep up with demand.

Heck, I know some ecommerce and other heavy traffic sites that are still able to run on shared/non-dedicated hosting because they’ve been heavily optimized (although with the cost of hosting these days it might be more effective just to upgrade the server).

Oh well, at least I know it’s not my fault and there’s not much I can do about this…:)

Yea, as long as your site loads within that 4 second window and you’re not experiencing any downtime (search engines hate unavailable sites) then you should be just fine.

The only other thing that you have to watch out for (and you’re probably ok if your site already loads within the 4 second mark) is having a site that is too large for the search engines to crawl/index/cache. Google for example will only cache the first 150kb of a site in its index (not AS important, but something to think about).

It is really advisable to avoid flash, cleaning up the coding also minimizes loading time.

Great post I would also recommend a Firefox addon called lori or life of request info, tells you the time until first byte, time till completion and the size of the page so if you are trying to streamline your site this can tell you how you are doing.

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Thanks for the informative post. I've been telling a friend of mine that has a website focused on microcap stocks that his account with Homestead needs serious consideration about changing host. HIs website constantly loads slow but he says he never loses visitors becasue of it. I say he's not paying attention to his analytics and the fact that web surferers impatience grows more an more each year.

It is important how quickly a site loads – I know I leave sites that take ages. I wouldn’t always trust tool to work this out for you though. I have found then very inacurate.

I wanted to have a really cool looking, flashy site with a whole bunch of gizmos, but I ended up having to stick with a lot of the basics because it was taking forever to load and I did not want to chance losing customers.

Having a quick loading site is key when trying to due business online. People get really impatient when it takes 10sec to load a page on the internet. If your page is taking a long time to load, find the root of the problem whether it be a flash script, or a large image, or coding gone wrong and fix it ASAP

You can still have a flashy site with loads of images that loads quickly. You’ve got the take the time to think about what you are doing and how it can be optimised to use the smallest images that make the most impact.

The problem with having a large number of images (even if they’re optimized correctly) is still having to deal with the high latency and loading times because of the multiple files. One good technique is using CSS Sprites (multiple images in one file) to cut down on the number of files required, and still being able to use multiple images on a site.

Another good tip on how to make a website loading faster is to spread out your content neatly. So, when you find yourself having very long pages of content, break them down into separate logical sections and thus bring down the sizes of the individual pages.
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I only just started tweaking the fat off my main landing page and the tools mentioned work like a charm, thanks

Wow! Totally awesome, Thank you so much for sharing! I know that when a site takes too long I just leave it!
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my sites been taking ages to load.. due to which bounce rate has increased to around 80%.. i hope to sort it out quickly..

This is some good stuff, I think my site is around the 1 to 2 second range but I do not have any images or anything up maybe that is why. I heard that if you are using wordpress as a blogging platform that the WP-Cache plugin will make your site load faster also
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This information is very useful for me .thank you!

many thanks for the post,and I think page load is a way to keep your visitor on your web site. Most of the visitors never wait more than 5 seconds to load a page. So its very important to load the web page within four seconds. And all the maintained points are very important to boost your page load time Well!

Regardless of all the tech mumbo jumbo, what i know is Google has included side speed factor in their algo change. So if your site speed is slow, better sort it out by using CSS and remove heavy images or properly optimize them.

Great article.

As a photographer i have lots of web galleries, but i am conscious of my website’s overall load times, as well as minimising the Flash content because, like you mentioned, iPhones etc do not support Flash.

I recently went from plain old html to CSS and have not looked back, far faster load times =o)

great article, a site that loads slow loses traffic, I can count how many times I have be frustrated by sites that load slow with too much HTML and media

Interesting article. As you know Google launched its PlusOne service a while back and everyone can put +1 button on their site.

But, I noticed by adding this button, you site will suffer a very huge load time.

Anyone else experience this?