Webmasters: Speed Up Slow-loading Sites

Speed up your website:If your site does not load in half a minute or less, you could lose a significant number of visitors. The Internet by nature is a rapid-paced world: a universe in which potential customers and clients will not wait for long when they can easily zip to another, faster site. Your site, no matter what its function, must be as fast as possible to survive - without sacrificing quality or aesthetic appeal. Here are some of the most common "site slow-downs" and how to fix them without making your site look anything less than professional.

-Remember that even if your site loads very quickly on your computer(s), it might take forever on the systems used by many of your visitors. Not all Internet surfers are on high-speed connections. Many people multi-task, which will slow down everything. There are many reasons for sites to slow down on the visitor's end only, so try to account for this phenomenon when you are designing your pages. Run them on several machines, with different browsers and connections. Have your friends or co-workers access the pages under normal working/usage conditions so that they can give you instant feedback. Whatever you do, don't limit your test runs to one or two computers.

-Flash intros are not necessary. If they were, why would most programmers include a "Skip Intro" option? They wouldn't, of course. Don't waste your time or resources trying to impress visitors with something that could take forever and half a day to load, which is the first sign to surfers that they might not want to stick around at your site for long.