It is one situation which every web lover tries to forget and avoid. That is the downloading of web pages. There are a number of websites which are really slow. You will at last give up, but the pages will not download. Web designers can adopt various strategies to improve the speed of web pages.

Optimization of images is one important aspect. It is a good practice to go for images which are not larger than 10 Kb. However, it is very difficult with animations. But if you can achieve your objective, you will get some really fast images.

After you get your images optimized, you can use HTML to call them. Specify the height and width of images in the image tag. HTML enables the browser to keep delivering the web page while the image gets downloaded in the background. You will come across many websites that prefer eliminating all additional tags to the point of getting rid of end and tags. It is not a viable idea. Of course, you can remove all the superfluous attributes generated by some editors and employ defaults of tags as much as possible.

Even after getting small images and clean HTML, you may still persist with the problem of slow downloading. Web pages sometimes contain so much information that increases their size. For fast downloading, limit your page sizes including images to 30 Kb.

Another cause for slow downloading is nested tables. Web designers use them more often as they improve the layout tremendously. But web browsers take so much time to deliver nested tables. Nested tables contain tables within tables. So it becomes an uphill task for the browser to show off the page.

Advertisements are downloaded from servers other than the server of the web page. Due to dependency on multiple servers, the whole downloading process becomes very complex. If a particular web server is slow, then it influences the downloading time of the whole page. The same thing happens in case of counters and other external CGIs and images which reside on different web servers.

If your downloading time is still on the higher side after employing all the above techniques, it is time to check your web server. It may be unable to handle the traffic of your website. If it is not displaying the bandwidth you look for, then you need to upgrade it or verify the connection between it and the rest of the web world.

White space in your HTML code can slow your pages. Some web designers have a bad habit of starting their code after ten or more lines of blank space. Whether you do it knowingly or by chance, these spaces can add up your page download time. More than two carriage returns per row is a bit excess.

Use your list tags which enclose list items in a proper manner. Never write them on separate lines from the contents. It results in waste of space. So always be careful about closing the tags on the same line you open them. In the end, do not remove all the white space as you may require making modifications later. Eliminating all the white spaces can result in difficulties in reading.

Tags: Reduce Download Times of Web Pages