Speed is critical: how to display your web pages
in a blink of an eye
It must have happened countless times to you too - you went to a website and waited, waited, waited, but it took forever to load. So you left...
While there is no one single measure of the quality of your web site, speed is certainly one of the most important.
In fact, speed is absolutely crucial for the success of your site. People do not have much patience when it comes to cruising the web and the research shows that:
- Your visitors will leave if they are forced to wait for more than few seconds. All your effort in bringing them to your site will be lost.
You could be losing 50% or more of your sales as a result.
- 85% of all sites on the Internet are slow to load.
You cannot assume that all of your visitors have T1 connection - they don't - and saving few seconds and showing your site faster can make a huge difference between people leaving in irritation or staying to see what you are offering.
Luckily, with very little effort on your side you can cut the loading time of your pages by half, and in extreme cases we have seen the reductions to 1/10 of the original loading time.
You will speed up the loading of your pages in 3 easy steps, which will vastly improve your standing with your visitors and earn you their appreciation:
Step 1: Reduce the number of images and animations
The first thing to do is simply delete unnecessary images and animations. The image should not be there just to make your site look pretty. Animated banners have lost their effectiveness and are mostly ignored today. Ask yourself if the images and animations contribute to the message you are trying to convey. If they don't, get rid of them.
Another way to reduce the number of images is to replace them with text, a strategy most effective when substituting navigation images. Text links and style sheets can be used instead of 3-state images (normal state, roll-over, and active).
Alternatively, you can split your navigation into primary and secondary links. If you use images for navigation, there is no need to have Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and Privacy Policy next to Products and other main links. Your navigation will be more efficient if you group your primary links together, and use textual links for AUP, Privacy Policy and other secondary navigation.
Having done that, keep in mind that you do not want to have an altogether graphics-free site. Well-placed images and animations will:
- Illustrate your products and services
- Make navigating your site easier, and
- Make your site more professional.
Step 2: Help browsers render your pages
Always specify the size of all images and animations in your HTML code. This is an important, but often overlooked step. This way, the browser will reserve the space for your images/animations, render the rest of the page, and display them once they have been downloaded.
If the browser does not know the size of your images/animations beforehand, it will reformat the page to display them, which looks very unprofessional.
Step 3: Optimize your images and animations
Because well-placed graphics will greatly enhance your pages, this step is the most important one.
- Optimize the size your images.
Even though photographic or computer-generated images in JPG/JPEG and PNG formats are compressed, in most cases it is possible to further compress them with Animator Professional or a similar tool, saving further 30-60% without any noticeable loss of quality.
- Trim the images.
There is no point in having the images larger than they have to be. Trim all the white-space around the image, reducing its size and the loading time. When you use Animator Professional, trimming only takes one single click.
- Downsize.
If the original image is big, display its thumbnail instead, with a text saying "Click here to see the larger image".
- Use image maps for navigation.
This will allow you to use one single image and map various areas on it for navigation. This is far more efficient than using several individual images.
Marking the areas on your images only takes seconds when you use HTML Map Creator (which is built into Animator Professional), even if the hot areas have an irregular shape:
- Convert your photographic images to 256-color images.
You will be surprised how often you cannot tell the original and the 256-color version apart - not all photo images use millions of colors.
If you have lots of images to convert, use the Image Processor (built into Animator Professional) to batch-convert all of them in a single go.
- Optimize the look of your most-important images and animations.
Simply apply an interesting effect to an image and turn focus to it. For example, instead of having 3 plain-looking images, you only have a single great-looking image, with all the attention focused on it.
For tips on how to do that see the article how to add special effects to your animations.
- Optimize animations and videos. Make sure your animation/video files are highly compressed. For example, uncompressed AVI files are huge. A well-designed 3-frame animated GIF can often give stronger message than a 30-frame animation.
Optimizing your media files will have a big impact on the loading time of your site, and on the number of visitors who decide to stay. Just think of the extra sales this is going to bring.
Animator Professional effortlessly optimizes your animations whenever you use it to create animated gif, avi, mpeg, QuickTime and WindowsMedia (WMV) files.
Does it take LOTS of work to optimize everything?
Well... it can take lots of work and it can be costly, the trick is to do it with minimal time and effort.
Here are your choices:
- Get a web designer or a graphics artist to do it for you.
This is a hands-free approach, but it will cost you lots of money and you depend on them each time you make a change.
- Use free tools.
Some web sites will allow you to upload a file, give your email address, and receive the optimized version. Or, doing a search on SourceForge will give you a number of free image-processing tools: http://sourceforge.net/search/
It is always tempting to go for free tools, but to do the job properly you will need a large number of different ones, they are often unstable and badly supported, and all lack preview, forcing you to do trial and error until you get it right.
- Do all your image/animation jobs with few clicks with a single easy-to-use tool.
You already know that the Animator Professional software is loaded with killer features that reduce time-consuming and tedious image optimizing to seconds:
- You specify the type and level of compression and preview the original and the optimized image side-by-side in real time.
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You see instantly the amount of time to load the images with different Internet-connection speeds.
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You trim the images with a single click.
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You create image maps for navigation simply by marking areas of all shapes on your image.
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You can use Animator straight away, you are 100% in control, and image effects are a breeze.
And this is only a small part of what your Animator software can do for you.
I won't go over the moon with it here; I know that you have already heard a lot about this software. Just know that it can save you tons of time and cash. To learn more about how to get your images/animations/videos in top shape with Animator Professional, click here now.
Putting it all together
Your visitors are always only one click away from going elsewhere. Speed is critical to the success of your web site.
Removing unnecessary graphics, helping the browsers render your pages easier, and optimizing your graphics will dramatically speed up the loading of your web pages.
Optimizing the graphics can be time-consuming, costly and tedious. But, with the right tool it is fast and easy. Also, enhancing one image through special effects will have more impact than displaying three plain images.
Make an effort to enhance and optimize your graphics - it can literally make or break your business.
Take a look at Animator Professional, which combines all the tools you need into a single easy-to-use program.
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