Get
FASTER Download Times By Making BIGGER Web Pages!
by: Michael Hopkins
As a webmaster you already know how important it is
that your web pages download fast. In a nutshell,
if your pages are slow, then you're losing visitors.
And if you're losing visitors, you're losing money.
To speed up your download times, most web design experts
will suggest that you optimize your GIFs and JPGs
so that they download faster. They'll suggest that
you make your images smaller or remove them altogether.
Or they'll simply suggest that you put less stuff
on your pages.
All of these methods work. The problem, however, is
that they all involve doing things that you don't
want to do. You don't want to squeeze any more quality
and color out of your images. The same goes for your
content - you put it there because you want it there.
Basically, there's only so far you can go with these
approaches before you really start to ruin your page.
Fortunately, there's one way to get your pages opening
faster without having to compromise your images or
your content. This is a simple and effective method,
but one that is rarely discussed by the web design
experts.
To understand this approach, it's important to recognize
the difference between "perceived" download
time and "actual" download time. The perceived
download time is the time it takes to have enough
stuff displayed on your page for the visitor to be
able to start studying your content. The actual download
time is the time it takes for the entire page and
all its contents to be fully downloaded.
The perceived download time is the one that really
counts. Why? Because once your visitor has something
before his/her eyes to read or look at, then there
is much less risk that he/she will click away because
your page is taking too long to load.
So how do you improve your perceived download time?
Simple, you break the content of your page down into
two or more tables.
You see, web browsers will not start displaying the
contents of a table until it has compiled the entire
table to the end. Once a table is compiled it will
display, and the browser will start compiling the
next table.
That means that if you place the entire contents of
your page inside one big table, the browser will have
to compile the entire contents of your page before
anything will be displayed. The result: your visitor
spends all that time staring at a blank screen.
However, by putting some of the content towards the
top of the page into a table of its own, the rest
of the page can be downloading farther down, while
your visitor is busy studying the stuff that's already
displayed.
I've used this method to great effect on my own website.
I went from an actual download time of up to 20 seconds
(staring at a white screen) down to a perceived download
time of rarely more than 3 seconds (often as low as
1 second)!
The ironic thing is, my page is now bigger (in terms
of Kilobytes) than it was before I made the change.
That's because 2 tables take more HTML than one.
But boy has that extra bit of HTML paid off!
Make a test page now and try it out. Your hit counter
will thank you for it!
About The Author
Michael Hopkins is owner of BizzyDays eBook Publications.
Download Brand New Original eBooks for FREE at:
http://www.bizzydays.com
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contact@bizzydays.com
