Which is more important ? Style or Speed. This is such a hard question when it comes to web designing & optimization for search engines. This is especially true when it comes to smaller niched blogs. If you don’t already know which is important then let me tell you. The first impression you give your visitor is the most important, most crucial, most judgmental moment that will either make or break your website.

So what’s more important to you ? Having a website that has all the bells , whistles and a ridiculous twitter widget that takes over 15 seconds to load over cable broadband (5 years for 56k users).

Or instead prefer to have a site that allows you to have the best of both style and speed.

~ Snapple Fact ~

People are so dam impatient on the Internet, so your website better be fast enough to satisfy the demands of some people.

Your goal should be optimizing your website’s load times , which is also the name of this article.

1. Time Your Website’s Load Time

• Raven-Seo – Full Report & Suggestions on how to improve Load Time & SEO suggestions. I truly love this tool , by the way It’s free
• Website Optimization Page Analysis – Gives you a full detailed report on every little element and object that is loaded into the browser. This includes the sizes of CSS style sheets , JavaScript sizes in full detail.
• Pingdom – Full Analyze and Chart to how long your website takes to load as well as shows you a visual bar graph. It then goes further to break down each element’s loading time. I enjoyed checking this site out.

Benefits of Optimizing Website Load Time ?

1. Saves your bandwidth , which also saves you money !
2. Faster Loading times will impress your user’s first time visit
3. Generate more page views
4. Search Engines reward websites with smaller sizes.

2. How-To Optimize images on your Website

Real Simple. If you just use Photoshop by itself to Optimize your Jpeg’s , Png’s , Gifs & other images.

“Then you have failed miserably”

If you really want to shrink and optimize the file size of your images then you will want to use Adobe Fireworks. It has an amazing ability to import images files and then export them efficiently and highly optimized for your website. If you don’t have Fireworks then I strongly suggest you go and download a demo to see if you like it.

For those of you who do have it , I made a video showing the steps on how to optimize jpegs , gifs and other images you want to have on your website.

Fireworks Image Optimization Tutorial from rohin sharma on Vimeo.

Another great alternative to Fireworks is a new website called Smush.it , basically they will optimize pretty much any image format to the most efficient size possible without loosing quality. The quality of their optimization in comparison to Fireworks is equally as good although fireworks outperforms it in some categories of optimizing image file sizes.

3. Optimize your Website’s CSS

A majority of your CSS stylesheets are usually not the main cause for a bloated website. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t include your css files in the optimization process. The best way of optimizing your website would be combining all css stylesheets into a single file for the header.

Remember every little kb counts when you add them all up towards your website.

Blogging Pro already wrote a mind blowing article-analysis on CSS-Optimization so go take a look at that. There’s no reason in me beating a dead horse with a stick.

http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2006/08/17/css-optimization/

 

CSS Optimization Tools

1. http://www.cleancss.com/
2. http://iceyboard.no-ip.org/projects/css_compressor
3. http://www.cleancss.com/
4. http://www.cssoptimiser.com/
5. http://flumpcakes.co.uk/css/optimiser/

Your Not Done Optimizing Your Website Yet !

4. Optimizing Your Website’s Javascript

In some cases if you’re using a CMS system such as Wordpress , Joomla or Drupal then chances are you’re also using plugins.

If you take the time to count up all the plugins you have you can come to the simple conclusion that all those scripts are gonna hurt your website’s load time !

Personally I’ve cut down on nonsense b.s. wordpress plugins that have little use for me.

Javascript Optimization Tools

1. http://www.pinkorange.at/tools/jscompress/
2. http://javascriptcompressor.com/
3. https://jawr.dev.java.net/
4. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/9/
5. http://www.jslint.com/

Your Website Optimization CheckList

Website Optimization is never an easy process but it can be fun optimizing your site to load faster and faster. The end results are very satisfying and your visitors will notice the load time as well.

♥ Optimize Your Image Sizes
♥ Optimize Your CSS StyleSheets
♥ Optimize Your Javascripts

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