Speed is certainly one of the most important factors when it comes to making a successful web site. These days? people have high expectations, they expect a web site to load as fast as an application on their operating system, and therefore even a few seconds of waiting can frustrate them or leave altogether.

A good website should take about 8-12 seconds (for a 56K) to load. The website owner is going to have to decide how fast its pages are going to be, for example for a multimedia or a flash site they can afford to be a bit slower than others provided that the users know the nature of the site.

If you're curious as to how fast you're website is here are two websites that checks your speed:

http://www.vertain.com/?sst
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Ways to speed up your website

HTML issues:

- Use CSS where possible: Because pages with stylesheets load faster than those web sites designed with font tags and tables, and also it's much faster and easier to make changes. (Some resources on CSS ? http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp, http://www.websitetips.com/css/, and http://www.glish.com/css/)

- Stay clear of nested tables: Nested tables are basically tables within tables, but too many of theses can really slow down the browser. When a page loads the browser starts from the top and goes down in a consecutive manner, with nested tables it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing.

- Specifying height and width: For tables and images it's a good idea to specify their height and width, as it helps out the browser and therefore speeds up the process.

Also, do not forget to optimized the images for web use.

Page size:

- Reduce the number of images where possible: Most common causes of slow web pages are images, but they are also the easiest to fix. Try to eliminate
repeat and unnecessary images, so they are not downloaded the second time. And also try not to use images for words, unless it's absolutely necessary reason being the download time and also they can't be searched.

- Reduce the size of images: Everybody uses different techniques (e.g.
converting to JPEG), but as long as the images are compressed it's
beneficial for everyone.

- Remove unnecessary multimedia: This includes video, audio, flash and
animation, if it isn't important then it shouldn't be on the page.

- Remove unnecessary scripts: Some codes can slow down the site, consider
evaluating the codes and making them better if possible.

- Remove unnecessary META tags and META content: META tags don't achieve very much anymore, people used them for search engine optimization but due to misuse they don't hold much importance in SEO.

Web host:

- Bandwidth: Make sure you have enough bandwidth allocated, it's a good idea
to attain more bandwidth then needed just in case of a sudden rise in
traffic. If you're website is nearing its limit the website speed can
decline significantly.

- Capacity of severs: There's a limit as to how many people can access your
website so once again if your web site is growing in traffic, you should
consider upgrading your service.

These are just some of the basics to speed up your website, there are many
other ways you can reduce download time for your website.

Good point, what do you think is the best way of optimizing images?

Great tips you have there! Thanks for sharing.

Thank you

Nice tips. Thanks

what i would recommend is try using less bulky graphics on your page and thry to stick to basics rather than using big flash pages. there are still many people who use dial up in many part of world

Thanks for the testing links. I tried out Vertain and my site had a 7 second load time. This did not tell me at which speed it was connecting. I was hoping to get a comparison for like dial up load speed. I'll try your other reference as well and see what results.

Anyhow, Vertain said their benchmark average speed is around 3 seconds and it gave me details of my loading process.
My site took about 1 second to load and the Google Banner took about 6 seconds to load. Okay, now I'm agravated.