How to make your own website
a free guide for beginners

Website Speed

One of the more important factors of website design in making your website friendly for both the user and the search engines alike. Making sure that your website is quick to load and respond, is crucial to its success. As we tried to stress throughout this guide, your website has a very short time to make a good first impression. If a user has to wait a long time for the page to come up because you have too many graphics, videos, or music loading in the background, they will quickly click away. The speed of your website also depends on the speed of your hosting servers so quality hosting service is a must.

Since search engines aim to satisfy their users by anticipating how they would pick the top results, they too like websites that load fast. Google pretty much made this a public knowledge by stating that if all other factors between competing websites are equal, a website that loads faster may be considered better and thus get the edge in the rankings.

Tips to help you design a website that loads and operates quickly,

• Large images slow down your site
  so try to keep your image files small. Consider using small thumbnail images on a page and linking to larger images which would open in a separate window or image viewer.
• Try not to display too many images on one page
  as this will definitely slow things down.
• Minimize the amount of external content
  like javascript links, html code, banners, etc., that you put on your website. Since the content is external and comes from somewhere else your page load time is also dependent on those outside resources and their speed.
• Don't make your pages too long with too much content.
  Even too much text on a page can cause it to load slow.
• Try a text based menu instead of a graphic menu.
  This will not only decrease the amount of files for the browser to load but text links are much better for search engine optimization than images.

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