How to Make a Site Load Faster

[cz]

Can anyone share some good ideas about speeding up the load time of my site? It's the second link under my sig. I'd like to get it down near the "30 seconds through a 28k connection" standard. I can't think of anything else I can trim out. My product pics are not large files and my graphics aren't huge either??

Any opinions welcome. Thanks!

[speed]

Move to using CSS for layout and controlling style as I find this can result in less code e.g.

<FONT SIZE=2 FACE="arial, helvetica">balh balh blah</FONT>

Would go to:
<span class="type1">blah blah blah</span>

Saving 12 characters in the HTML, add all those up and it can be quite a saving.

Then in the external style sheet you have:

.type1 { font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size 2; }

The style sheet is normally downloaded once then cached.

The other thing you can do is move the title banner to be the background of a <div> so that it is downloaded after the rest of the site, it'll give the appearance of the site loading faster.

Finally you should feed your site through the validator at http://validator.w3.org and fix all the errors.

[Faglork]

A good overview:
"Fundamentals Of Web Site Acceleration"
http://tinyurl.com/5njsg

Greetings form Germany,
Alex

[Dragonsi]

I viewed the site on a 46.6Kbps connection and it took less than 10secs to fully download and appear, not too bad really.

I agree that moving all formating to CSS will improve this even more.

[cz]

Thanks for the input everyone. I appreciate it a lot. Excellent advice. I'll be getting started on your suggestions. The site draws a lot of dialup customers and every bit of speed I can squeeze out of it is good.