There are instances of great websites having excellent look and feel and interactivity performing poorly. The main cause of concern is the excessively slow rendering of web pages. There are some common and sensible tricks that can help you enhance your website download speed.

The first thing you can do is to decrease the number of HTTP requests. Each HTTP request deals with the loading of a particular object on your website. Every loading takes a round-trip latency of about 0.2 seconds on an average. Suppose your site loads 20 objects, irrespective of whether they are image files, style sheets or scripts. You can calculate the total latency time which is 4 seconds on an average broadband connection. Certain websites have specific sections filled with many images. You can reduce the HTTP requests for this section by using image maps.

Another cause for slow rendering of web pages is the dependency over other sites for loading of several components. A large number of requests from a single server can increase the workload on that server and which in turn can result in a slow website. If you will go for multiple servers of other sites, this can lead to a rise in latency time and can put your site’s downloading time out of gear, in case a particular server gets crashed.

People while developing images in Photoshop commit mistakes by saving their images in the normal way. But Photoshop has a ‘save for web’ option which you must utilize regularly. Apart from that, you must keep trying various settings and image file formats. You may opt for PNGs or GIFs for your images. The major factor that determines the size of an image is the palette or the number of colors used in the image. Gradients contribute greatly in increasing the image size. So try to replace the gradient with a color overlay or decrease the opacity of the gradient. You can see the effect in the form of saving some kilobytes for your image.

You can reduce the space on your site by compressing the CSS, JavaScript and PHP employed on your site. You won’t receive any notable benefits by compressing PHP in a normal fashion as it is a server-side scripting language. But while using PHP for constructing your website, you can compress it by eliminating all white space present in it. The task of compressing of files is quite problematic as editing them is very painstaking. It is advisable to maintain two copies of the same file, a compressed copy and an uncompressed copy. You can compress your PHP files by removing all white spaces manually. You can do the same thing in case of CSS files also. But you can also take the help of CSS Tweak to deal with bulky files.

Websites have made space for Live Comments, Live Search and Live Archives. These things are attached with large JavaScript files. The implementation of these JavaScript files can considerably slow down your site. So the less you make use of them, the better it will be for your site as far as running is concerned.

Tags: Make Your Site Running Faster