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The question regarding the speed of a website should be raised sooner or later by every person who sets out to build a website. Fast-loading websites are more fun to browse, and they provide a better overall experience to the average visitor. This article will shed some light over the common reasons that cause a website to load at a crawling speed, together with tips on how to improve it.

First, we’ll understand the term “bottleneck”. In computers, a bottleneck is the thing that affects the subject the most, as systems tend to adjust themselves to the weakest link in the chain – finding that link usually gets half of the job done, leaving you with the simple task of getting it fixed. There may be several bottlenecks – in that case, you’ll just have to solve them, one by one.

Now, let’s understand some of the inner workings of the browser.

Once the address has been typed in and the “Enter” key has been pressed, the computer automatically performs a task called “resolving” that seeks out the actual location of the sought data, then establishes a connection to that source. The next obvious step is to commence the stream of data, “draw” the information to the local storage, and display it properly.

As some rehabilitation programs suggest, there are things you have influence on as well as other things you can’t affect. Let’s use this as a metaphor: given you use the latest version of your favorite browser, there would be nothing else to be done regarding the speed of it actually displaying the information. Taking into account the limitations of your web-connection, it is another thing you have little influence on (short of the possibility of upgrading your data plan…).

Luckily, as a website builder, you have direct influence over the proper construction of your webpage: the “cleaner” your code is, the easier it will be to the browser to “re-assemble” it after downloading it to its local storage. The lighter your media are, the faster it will be to download them. Let’s define a term for future usage – website weight, which would be the sum of all the data on a certain webpage. Clearly, “heavy” websites will take longer to load.

Correct website construction is the key.

Keep your code as light as possible (you might want to consult a professional website builder/programmer/SEO specialist for that matter) and it would load faster. Look at the code even if you’re not familiar with HTML: tidy code should look relatively legible to the “naked eye”, while a complex code will look messy, “wall-of-text-like”,

If pasting from different sources, make sure you “clean” the text of external settings (pasting it in Notepad beforehand might be useful) and keep your pages within a reasonable length – most people, unless reading an article, would dislike the act of scrolling…

Make sure you nullify the design changes before setting new ones to avoid situations in which a setting doesn’t replace the old one, but is being added to it.

Regarding the actual weight, make sure you don’t load a whole lot of images and animations right away. One might Google the term “website speed test” and run one of the many available tests on one’s website to get a rough estimation of its weight. 100 Kilobytes are perfect for a homepage. 500 could be fine as well, but pushing this number upwards may harm the overall experience of the visitor. You can also try compressing your images: most graphic software already include the option to save images “for web” – by lowering their quality to sane web-standards, opposed to the enormous sizes pictures come in when being downloaded from your camera, for example.

A common misconception is when resizing images. Many webmasters upload huge pictures, then display them in a tiny version. This does not actually affect the size of the image! You can display a huge image as a tiny thumbnail without actually affecting it. Try looking for both online and software-based “Resize” or “Resample” tools – these actually convert the image into a smaller one, reducing its size.

If you build a website, make sure you have multiple browsers installed.

Some are faster, some are slower, but having several will allow you to see the differences and seek out browser-specific optimizations.

Browsers are being updated often as well. One of the improvements that constantly appears on the release-log is ’speed improvements’ or ‘brand new rendering engine’. This shows you just how much the browser has influence over the speed of the website.

Lastly, make sure you do plenty of testing yourself.

Try different configurations, from different locations and different networks. Have friends to test your website and summarize their observations regarding speed. This is the most valuable constructive criticism you can ask for – as most people would not like to wait for their actual customers to complain. If all else fails, consult a specialist: overlooking such problems could be hazardous to your business in the long run.