Making Pages Load Faster

The bottom line for making web pages load faster isyou can't. The page will load as fast as the server can send it and the recipient can receive it. Those are both factors beyond your control.

What you can do, though, is make sure that your page is arranged so that there's something to see while the graphic loads. Bring up a Welcome headline first, and then add the background. If there's a graphic that will take some time to load, bring up a block of text before the graphic appears. The load time for the picture will seem much shorter if the person waiting has something else to read or think about.

Keep your images small or put up a thumbnail and link the full- size picture to it, so visitors have the option of waiting to see the big picture. If the content of your picture is important, put a text description of it on the page, too. If you learn HTML, you can use the ALT tag to place an image description in place of the image. (This also helps make your website handicapped-accessible, which is important to do for the millions of visually impaired Web users.)