The amount of time it takes for your website to load onto the visitor's screen is a major influence on traffic to your site. Research has shown that most internet users will leave your website if it takes more than 10 seconds to load and some potential guests will exit even faster. A quick loading website is vitally important to the success of your site.



There are a variety of different ways a person may access your site. Individuals still using dial-up connections will typically see the slowest load times. If you have a site that loads slowly for high speed internet users, chances are that those with dial-up will give up long before the site is loaded. To get visitors to browse your website, it must load quickly.

One way to tell if your website may load too slowly is to check your visitor statistics. Look for a high number of page loads for your home page with little or no activity on the other pages. This could mean your visitors are clicking away because they become tired of waiting for your page to load.

To ensure a quick and efficient loading time, monitor the size of each of your website pages, as well as the download time. There are a few other things you can do to increase your loading time as well.

Weigh Your Graphics

Images, pictures, and other graphics are one of the main causes of slow loading web pages. Use a minimal amount of graphics in your website design, only using those that are really necessary. If your page is loading too slowly, reevaluate your graphics and eliminate more if possible.

Revise Your Code

Unnecessary coding can create a larger file size that slows down your page loading. Design your pages using style sheets to decrease the amount of HTML coding in each page. You can also use a tool like HTML Tidy to eliminate any coding within your page that is not needed.

Resize Your Images

If you have eliminated your unnecessary coding and unneeded graphics, but still experience sluggish loading times, you can resize your graphics. Using a photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop, you can make the images and pictures you need to keep in your website design smaller so they load faster.

Evaluate Your Web Host

A website can only be as good as the web host. If you have followed the previous suggestions and still have slow loading web pages, your host could be to blame. Test the loading time of your website on other computers with various types of internet connections and if the problem remains, you should consider contacting your hosting company to discuss the issue. If your situation is not resolved, it may be time to find a new web host.

Fast load times will increase your traffic and visitors will browse your site longer. An increase in traffic and visitor lengths can only bring an increase in sales!