You’ve worked on your website, toiling day and night to get it just … right. Now it’s beautiful and chock full of information. Turn the switch and watch your visitors flood in.
Problem is, nothing happens.
Maybe your site is just running too slowly for their comfort. After all, we’ve all been victim of a slow-loading site at least once upon a time. There you are, drumming your fingers until the darn thing loads up, cursing through your teeth all the while.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The fault, dear friend, is not in our servers, But in our sites, that we are underlings.” Maybe.
In order for your site to load quickly, you must have a fast enough server at your disposal. But even the fastest server is going to be compromised if the images and background in your site is not properly optimized. But how do you know for sure?
There are a few websites that will analyze your site to make sure it’s running at optimal speed. Some are (courtesy of GrokDotCom):
2. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug
With respect to images, it’s important to know that every image – no matter how colorful (or not) it is – contains a full spectrum of colors codes. Some of those codes may not be used in the image, so it just sit there taking up space. When the website loads the image it’s got to bring up the entire color palette even if a particular color isn’t being used. That takes time and resources on your web server, slowing down how quickly the site as a whole loads.
So what’s to be done? You need to optimize your site graphics so that they strip away the unused colors in favor of the ones needed to render properly.
If you’ve got Photoshop and know how to use it (I do not know how to use Photoshop) then apparently you can get this done with a click of a few mouse buttons. But for those of us who do not use Photoshop, there are some online resources to get the job done. Here, courtesy of LimeExchange, are ten of them:
- Web resizer
- Smush.it
- PNGCrushrrr
- WebGraphics Optimizer
- RIOT
- GIFBOT
- Super PNG
- Imageoptimizer
- Online Image Optimizer
- PNGGauntlet
I immediately noticed an increase in load speed on my sites once I began using some of these incredibly useful tools. And with the better load speeds came increased visitor engagement.
So go out there and grab all of your images, optimize them, and watch how much better your site performs.
Photo courtesy of djwudi.
that's a great post right there.
thank you for sharing it
thx for nice post!