Website Optimization: Compression Is Key
There are those who don’t understand that you download content every single time you visit a website. It’s true that in order for the digital media to be displayed on your screen things such as images and even text need to be downloaded. Ironically there are many web surfers that swear up and down they will never do any sort of downloading and they have no idea that this is precisely what they are doing every time they go to a website! Funny as that is, it also needs to be taken into account that because downloading is the process that occurs, files on the site need to be very small so that the load times are cut down, which is one of the best things you can do for website optimization.
In order to stay at the top of the rankings and keep people coming back you either need to minimize the amount of content downloaded or make it very small. If you do the proper website optimization, it won’t take very long for a file to be downloaded to a user’s computer, thereby making the web surfing experience a little more pleasant.
The first thing that you need to do is cut down on image size, especially images that are going to be seen frequently. The larger an image is, the more bandwidth it will take to load it and while you can do this by cutting down on the mages themselves, and it’s a fair bet that no one wants to look at a text filled page all the time. In this case what you need to do is reduce the size of your images. Unfortunately we are past the days when the.gif extension was enough because people possess graphics cards that can display more than 256 collars. Your best option in this case is to use what is known as.png format. This format compresses the image but keeps the same quality making it perfect for web content.
If you want to host any type of video for a website then you should, but you should also do your best to keep it off the main server. Putting it onto your main server will cause serious problems, like causing many people to have to wait for the video AND the website itself to load. If you can stream your video from alternative servers then you will find that it’s a lot easier to load the other content. The only problem with this is that you need to constantly make sure that the links to the streaming video are all functioning properly.
If your user load is heavier that you anticipated, then it would be best to also move all of your content to various servers. By doing this you can have content loaded from the server that is least busy. This content can include graphics and even text. Though it will all be on different servers each user will get the exact same experience. Doing this reduces load times, ensuring that people will come back to your website.
If you are offering physical downloads such as games, videos, game patches, or anything of a downloadable nature then you need to split it up into servers. Putting it on different servers helps alleviate stress on the connection and you could also set it up so that users have to possess a paid account on your site in order to get optimal download speeds.
If you really feel its necessary you can use some SEO or what is known as keyword optimization. This is where you use words that are popular in search engine within your page or in the meta tags. By doing this you will ensure that those who search for those keywords on a search engine will see your website in the list, and as more people click on it, it will make it’s way upward in the rankings.
If you know what you’re doing then setting up a web page will never be hard. The only hard part is making it useable and efficient but there are a lot of materials out there to give you a helping hand so you’ll never be alone in your never ending quest for optimization.
