What can be done to increase load time?

[filmmaker1996]

Currently, my website takes 4 seconds to load on a high-speed computer. I can't imagine what it would take on a dial-up connection. Is there any immediate fix I can do to increase load time? The website is http://www.bswake.com. Thanks!

[oracleguy]

It loads pretty fast for me however there are a few things you could probably do to reduce the size of the page. For example under the best sellers on the front page, each of those thumbnail images is around 40KB each. When I look at the image directly I can see that it is much bigger than the actual thumbnail size. If you generated more appropriate sized images for those, you could probably save around 100KB.

Unrelated to your question though when viewing your site at the top, your address text is on top of the text about how to size up for updates and discounts. I'm using Firefox 16.

[Redcoder]

Leverage browser caching: specify expiration dates for css, js and images to be greater than one week. This reduces fetches for new content every time the user reloads the page.

Specify image dimensions. Your images don't have dimensions therefore the browser has to spend time calculating the image dimensions from the image metadata. This takes time. Just specify <img width='' height=''.

If possible combine images into CSS sprites. In your site, all images have to be downloaded each. In most browsers, images from the same domain are not allowed more than 4 each to be downloaded at the same time. Better, use a CDN to allow for parallel downloads.

Minify your CSS. Many IDEs e.g PHP Designer offer minifying features. That reduces the CSS file sizes thus a smaller file to download.

Minify Javascript too.

Serve scaled images as OracleGuy suggested. Instead of having the HTML and CSS scale it for you.

For JS and CSS files which have little lines of code in them , just inline the code instead i.e put it in the main HTML/PHP file. This reduces the need to fetch/download multiple files and instead download one large file.

[kevin619]

Improving your sites page load times is not easy, and can be a bit of an art. Every web page is unique and appeals to a different audience. Optimization techniques that work well for sites with a global audience may actually have a negative effect for sites with a localized audience. Sites with just a few images will benefit more from certain techniques, while sites with lots of images will benefit from others. We've developed an online reporting solution to help make sense of it all and prove what's best for you. In this article we attempt to summarize these findings.