HTML HELP Optimising web sites
Writing web pages that download fast.
'Page weight' refers to the amount of time a page takes to download. You need to look to your audience here to see if this should influence the way you write pages. If you are writing for a local intranet you may be able to get away with larger pages. You may be able to get away with murder.
When you request a web page, your browser has to fetch the HTML for the page, read it and then fetch any further components of the page. These might be images or further complete pages if your resource uses 'Frames'. These 'Out and back' transactions with the web server take time. Downloading images takes more time. You experience this as the delay while your browser assembles the page. It's a good idea to keep this delay to a minimum - read the page on dealing with web page graphics for stuff on optimising the resources that go to make up a web page, and try not to use graphics where you could use text.
As for the web, though the links that make up the internet are speeding up, this is offset by more individuals having access, and using slower links at that. It is a very good idea to ask contacts to test your pages and check that they are not unreasonably slow. Especially with a resource's home page, if this becomes an issue, the following will cut down the 'page weight' and help it to load more quickly.
- Avoid using frames.
- Avoid using 'graphics as text' unnecessarily. Type headings etc in HTML, avoid 'images of text' which will take longer to download and involve a round trip to the server to fetch the image.
- Set
<WIDTH>and<HEIGHT>tags for images. The browser can then display the page at an early stage and load the images while the viewer reads the text. - Optimise your images. Check that you are using the right sort of file compression and image size. There's more on this in the next Question-and-Answer.
Mark Annand • Site updated April 12th 2013 • Site Counter:
All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.
Words found on a door lintel in the garden of a house in the Cretan village of Argiroupolis.
The lintel is a fragment from the city state Lappa, which occupied the same site.
Fifteen hundred years later, when you use the web, from time to time you might well feel that the author was on to something. And if you work with particle physics, you'll know he was ...