Speed is certainly one of the most important factors when it comes to making a successful web site. These days’ people have high expectations, they expect a web site to load as fast as an application on their operating system, and therefore even a few seconds of waiting can frustrate them or leave altogether.

A good website should take about 8-12 seconds (for a 56K) to load. The website owner is going to have to decide how fast its pages are going to be, for example for a multimedia or a flash site they can afford to be a bit slower than others provided that the users know the nature of the site.

If you're curious as to how fast you're website is here are two websites that checks your speed:

http://www.vertain.com/?sst
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Ways to speed up your website

HTML issues:

- Use CSS where possible: Because pages with stylesheets load faster than those web sites designed with font tags and tables, and also it's much faster and easier to make changes. (Some resources on CSS – http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp, http://www.websitetips.com/css/, and http://www.glish.com/css/)

- Stay clear of nested tables: Nested tables are basically tables within tables, but too many of theses can really slow down the browser. When a page loads the browser starts from the top and goes down in a consecutive manner, with nested tables it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing.

- Specifying height and width: For tables and images it's a good idea to specify their height and width, as it helps out the browser and therefore speeds up the process.

i've checken the first one of the links. it said that my website loaded in aroung 1.something seconds. looking at your definition of a good website being loaded, does it make my website look good or bad?


my webpage contains nested tables at level 2 meaning there are only two tables one is nested inside the other. but my page is loading quite well. although i don't specify the height and width of some of the images. tsk.

I believe that if the deffinition given for 8 to 12 seconds, one dot something is outsandingly good for the average speed time, I dont think it makes your website look bad, I dont even know why would you ask such thing...

Anyway tables are necessary, but only for tabular data, like an ordered list of items with more than one field.

But as of tables for design or layout, the main problem with them is that they are not as accessible (for the visually impaired mainly) as a pure xhtml / css driven layout, and besides you can totally upgrade your website design very quickly withouth touching the xhtml documents...

And mbacarra, could you post a link to your site?

This post has been edited by Lozbo: Mar 4 2006, 01:06 AM

I did the test on both links, and the second one was more detailed, and I didn't realized how long it toke my page to upload, since my whole layout is pictures, that are good quality, which is larger. Toke for dial up (56k), about 68 seconds to load. Damnn, that's real slow! But with my internet, the first link said it takes 2 seconds... but I think that's only my connection. Well thanks for the tip, well now I'm going to optimize more.

Some useful little tools, great finds kvarnerexpress. Using the first one, the main page of my site takes about half a second to load. The second tool gives more information and useful tips and such. Justa few more tips to speed your site up:

• Reuse images and make them as small as possible
• In forums and other scripts turn on the GZip compression
• Don't use multiple external files of the same type. E.g. combine all your CSS into one document.

If you've got the WebDev extension for Firefox you can get to this under the Tools menu.

Wow, cool, thanks for the links! Even though my most detailed and complicated site clocks in at a mere 4.79 seconds, I'm still going to smack it around til I get 2.00

Very useful tips on making websites load faster. The problem is images. If I want to make it looks good it should retain the maximum colors which give clarity to the images but just for the sake of loading faster if I reduce the picture quality clarity is being sacrificed.

I'm still thinking if there is another way to implement this. Because my site needs many images in the homepage itself.

And for CSS, what rvalkass said is very useful. Putting all the CSS in one file. I used to have different css for different pages. Nice tip.