Improving download speed

[dreamydell]

Hello everybody,

<SNIP>

I am the webmaster of an website where you could play very safely all types of Casino games and bet for your favorites sports game.

But I have a problem with the speed of my website. I thing, since there is a lot of material on my website, the HTML code need to be simplified.
Is it possible that you help me about this?

Also, I would like to use a forum on my website using ASP codes.
Do you thing this will decrease my websites open speed?

Your kind help will be highly appreciated,

[edited by: BlobFisk at 2:04 pm (utc) on July 7, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs please! See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[mogenshoj]

If you use tables for layout, you can change it to stylesheets/css.
This will not only improve loading speed, but the searchengines will love you for it and you will love it later if you need to make design changes. (and yes, i love it too :D).

[icpooreman]

css is a good start it will make each individual page smaller than table layout also peoples browsers will probably cache the css file meaning you only have to download the styles once across sites.

Try to avoid large images where possible. Also try to avoid using images for text once again this can be done with css. If you feel that you have to use images get hold of some image editing software and try to optimize the images before you put them out on the web alot of the time you'll get an image that looks exactly the same but cut the size of it

[maswee]

try to reduce the size of the page as it being a casino site must have lots of images because of which download time increases. Implement css for reducing code on a page and make it a separate css file.
secondly, reduce image size.
try to put text links instead of images which makes it search engine friendly and also lesser size.
make the page size not more than 10 k.

[tedster]

The size of the html page itself is rarely the main problem in a slow download. First, even if you do not use gzip at the server, this is a text file -- and there is native compression in the modems on both ends that zooms text files on their way.

There are two main culprits in a slow download, in my experience. And by far the biggest offenders are the big fat media files, whether static images, animations, sound or movies. If you want a dial-up visitor to have a decent experience, you need to create and optimize your media files with intelligence, and not blind button clicking. I've seen speech files recorded in stereo and made into high bit rate MP3s -- why? No one's speaking voice is that good.

The second big culprit, especially on larger corporate sites, is a lot of server side processing going on, and poor database design. In addition, many times "dynamic" pages are really not dynamic at all, and yet the server is asked to process the same output over and over and over throughout the day. Generating the page code once and then either caching it or serving it as a static file can work wonders.

If developers would just use a dial-up connection once in a while to check their work, instead of relying on whatever fat pipe they've got in the office, they would quickly find a different approach in many cases.

All that being said, it's still a good idea to make your html as efficient as you can - and that usually means using as much css as you can, and kicking most styles and javascripts into external files. However, if the media files are fat, trimming the html document alone will probably not be enough.