Is Your Website Slow? Make it Faster with Few Effective Web Development Tips

Internet users are highly impatient. If a recent study is to be believed, it says that internet users do not stay on a webpage more than 5 seconds if it fails to respond. This is a major concern for you if your website is slow and takes time to open and navigate in-between the pages. You might be losing potential customers just because your website is poor and cannot act fast.  Obviously, slow performance of a website is the biggest drawback for business. However, you can fight off this problem with some of the effective web development tips given below:

Avoid over loaded server

The speed of a website significantly depends on the server speed and server performs faster if it is less loaded. Hence, try to avoid over loaded server for hosting your website while web development. Also make sure that the server used to host your website has low ping values.

Prefer XHTML over Tables

It might seem difficult to implement, but practically it is more feasible. Tables take more time to render in the browser than DIVs. Therefore, use tables only where it is needed. For example, tables are more useful and appear more logical when it comes to tabular data.

Use GIF, JPG and PNG files appropriately

When you are experimenting with images during web development, you must know how appropriately you can use image files. For this, you must know their usage. For an instance, GIF is ideal for images having few colors, such as text, logos and line art. However, while saving such images in GIF file format do not forget to use a small color palette. Similarly, JPG files are ideal for detailed images with multiple colors like photographs. But these are heavy files and can increase the load on website. You can reduce the size of the JPG image file before saving, yet it will not affect the quality of the image. PNG is another file format which is meant especially for websites to obtain both transparent and non-transparent images. However, try to avoid transparent images, as IE6 often faces problems in displaying them.

Smartly use Make use of CSS files

Always mention each style in CSS files. This helps a lot to speed up the performance of a website. Besides, determine common properties in objects and define them once. Try your best not to repeat them. If you are using entirely different properties for particular page, prefer to define them in individual CSS file. This will reduce the time of viewers as they would not need to download those properties while viewing other pages. Compressing the CSS file also works well to improve the performance of web page.