Photo by 708718

Most people in the US and all the great countries in the world currently use DSL or High Speed Internet, but some people forget about the people in other developing countries with very slow Dial Up Internet, we also forget about the people that read our articles using their phones. I used to have Dial up and it was literally Hell. In order for me to load a picture I had to open up the page and wait about 46 seconds for a small 125×125 graphic to load, the same thing happens when I use my psp’s wireless internet. With this in mind, I want to give you some ways you can decrease your page load time dramatically.

Smaller Graphics
You can decrease your pageload a lot by simply adding smaller images to your posts. As I stated before, even a small 125×125 image takes a very long time to load in a Dial up connection. What you can do about this is decrease the quality of the graphic by using photoshop or any other image editing software, and then uploading the image and using it just like you would use any image.
You can also try using .gifs instead of other types of image files as I have heard that they have a better image compression.

Use the More Tag
If you use Wordpress you should be familiar with this code. What the tag does is it cuts a post short and instead of loading the whole post it will only load everything before the ‘more’ tag and it will add a link so that visitors can read the rest of the post.
If you want to read more about the More tag click here for one of Wordpress official codex tutorials.

Thumbnails as images
Something you can do to make your page load faster is to change the Image’s attributes in the Img Src tag. And if you want a visitor to see the full size then simply link to it. If you are using Wordpress, there are a few plugins that allow you to do just that. This plugin seems promising and I might start using it.

Don’t install useless plugins
We’ve all done it, if you haven’t then you are lying. There are tons of plugins that I have installed and ended up deleting. Some I have kept but they affected my speed so I had to delete them to accommodate my readers. When you install useless plugins you make your page load slower because the page has to make more requests to the server in order to load up all the plugin files, so if a plugin is not needed then that plugin should not be added.
If you do follow my advice and end up deactivating your plugin then make sure you delete it completely from your server as the file could possibly be used to hack your account by simply looking at vulnerabilities from a plugin, this is why many plugins release patches very often.

Analyze your website’s statistics
Demographic statistics and your Web Logs are very important during the development of your site. You should check who comes to your website and what they do once they are there. Check for the most clicked pages and images and see what your visitors are more interested in. You should also check what countries are your visitors from, if your visitors are mostly from the US and the UK then you shouldn’t worry about speed too much, but if you have a lot of visitors from South Africa and Mongolia, then you should start worrying.
If you are worried about your page load timing why don’t you ask your readers what they think of it, it’s always great to hear a new perspective.

If you follow my advice I guarantee you will make your pages load faster as it is proven that when a website loads faster more people visit it. Note that this tutorial is guaranteed to help you out, if your speed does not change at all it’s your hosts fault and you should contact them and ask them to move you to a new not crowded server.