For all those who are having websites or planning to have one, sincere advice is to make them get loaded as quickly as possible. The reason behind this is that, if the website takes long time to load there are chances that visitors will get frustrated and leave the website. This will impact on the business for a greater extent. Also most of the search engines today are listing the websites on the search pages based on their loading time. So if you want to get your website listed at the front pages of search engines and increase the marketing it is highly important to make it load quickly. Decreasing the page load time makes your website more authoritative and professional.
There are tools like “YSlow” from Yahoo and “Page speed” from Google to check the speed of websites. Both the tools acts as add-ons in firebug which is the most popular plugin used by php web developers today. Once both the tools are installed give a visit to the website you are planning to optimize. Then follow the simple steps mentioned in the tool to figure out the loading speed. They will also help you with some suggestions for increasing the speed of the websites.
Common suggestion provided by both the tools is to make use of CDN which stands for Content Delivery Networks. This network is considered to as slave servers as they help to deliver the content to the users as quickly as possible. When a visitor visits a website, the static contents of the website like images and videos will be stored in the near by network system. When a user visits the website again the dynamic data will be pulled from the main server where the website is hosted and the static data will be pulled from the geographically near by network system. Because of this the pages of the website will get loaded very quickly and makes the visitors to visit the site again and again. This is by far the most effective way of making your website fast, especially if your web pages tend to be over 600-700 KB in size (including images, css, js, etc.)
One of the best and effective mechanisms for reducing the load time of the website is to minimize the size of CSS and JavaScript files. It can be done very easily by making use of YUI compressor from Yahoo. This is java library and to make use of it java should be installed and also should have yuicompressor.jar file. The HTML files can be reduced in size by making use of htmlcompressor tool and you should have htmlcompressor.jar file to implement the process.
Nishant is very passionate about PHP development, codeigniter web application, web designing, SEO/internet marketing and blogging. If you like this post, he would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, share this post and follow me @phprockerz on Twitter.