Fast loading web pages are critical to the success of your website. Studies show the average person is only willing to wait 7 seconds at most for a page to load. You can have the greatest website in the world but if it takes longer than 7 seconds to load there is good chance the majority of your would be audience will never see it. Here are some steps you can take to ensure your webpages are loading fast.

1. Use text instead of images.

This is kind of a double benefit. Using text instead of images will not only speed up your web pages but it will also give you better ranking on search engines like Google. Those search engines don't read and organize image content. They only know the content of a page based on it's text.

2. Make sure your images are optimized.

Obviously if you create a web page that is all text it's going to look super plain. That may be a turn off to your visitors. Therefore you'll want to find a good balance between images and text on your website. You'll also want to make sure the images you do use are optimized for the web. That means it's compressed to the smallest file size that looks acceptable when displayed on a site visitors computer. I suggest you use an image editing software like Adobe Fireworks or Photoshop and use only images that are the jpeg or gif file types.

3. Reduce the total number of depend files on your page

Every file your webpage needs to pull from your server will take time to load. The more of these "hits" your page requires to be displayed the slower your website will load. You should take steps to reduce the number of dependent files your page requires to be displayed. For example you should combine images where possible, and condense dependent javascript and CSS. If you have tracking code that depends on connecting to another server you'll want to make sure that code is the last to load. This will allow your page to be displayed prior to loading that background code.

Using a little bit of common sense along with these best practices will help you speed up your website and see more visitors. We built WebStarts to use these best practices with every page you build - so if you're using WebStarts you will only need to consider the number and size of the images you're putting on your page. You can build your own free website by signing up at WebStarts.com