Website Optimization
How many times have you went to a site and it took forever to load? Well have you considered your sites load times? What do you do when you visit a site that takes forever to load? I am willing to bet that you leave, sometimes without reading a thing on the site. It can be frustrating to visit a site and wait forever for the content to load while a ton of widgets are popping up in the sidebar. If you have took the time to reed any of the reviews that I write then you will notice that I sometimes comment on clutter and tons of widgets. Nothing will get your site a bad review or ignored faster than it being slow. So here are a few tips to start getting your site on track;
- Reduce the clutter. Choose a couple of widgets and get rid of the rest. Does it help your site to show off the stats?
- Reduce the size of pictures and graphics on your site. This could make a big difference in load times. Save most pictures in jpg or png format and make sure they are small. You can still have a 1MB jpg.
- Choose a good number of ads and keep it to that. I am running 11 right now which could be too many and I will be looking at reducing that number soon.
- The last thing I will tell you is lower the number of posts that show on the front page. I keep it to 3 to 5 and that seems to work about right.
Now while this is not the be all to end all articles on decreasing load times it is a very good start. You may even be able to get your site on my EC List. It will also help reduce your bounce rate.
Thanks for reading,
James Terrell
Share This
James,
These are good tips for optimizing a web site. We’ve written an entire book on the topic for O’Reilly titled Website Optimization Secrets. Half of the book is devoted to search engine marketing and conversion, the other half to web site performance and metrics.
Best,
- Andy
Nice post
This is some good tips for optimizing a web site. Take it a make good use cause i am already using it.
Hi I have only recently moved into the field of on line marketing and the amount of information I have taken in is immense.I totally agree that the sites which take a long time to load are definitely more likely to be ignored and left before they even open up.It seems like a bad move as you have done the hard work and got someone to click on your site. How disappointing to leave it before it actually opens up fully !
I have to bear this in mind as just starting out I have to overcome the mindset of “more is better” and actually include relevant and topical items and not so much clutter on my sites. I am glad I came across this post as it has made me reconsider stuffing as much on my site as I can and hopefully I will be more targeted as to what I include in the future - thanks for the tip.
Really its one of the fabulous post and I just like it.Your blog provided us with valuable information to work with.Thanks a lot for sharing.Keep up the good works.
A cool post. That really deserve something special. Keep it up.