5 Tips to Make Your Web Site Load Quickly So Your Prospects Won't Get Impatient and Run Away

When developing your Web site, it's important to make sure your Web site loads quickly. If it takes too long to load, your prospect may get impatient and leave.

When a new visitor arrives at your site, they'll typically only want to wait a few seconds. If they wait longer than that, they'll move on to the many other Web sites available.

So what are some ways to make sure your Web site loads fast? Here are 5 tips:

1. Get a fast web host. This one's important. Your web host can make all the difference. Depending on the web host you choose, it can greatly affect the speed of your site. Some web hosts can load web pages more quickly than others.

Be sure to do some research when finding a good web host. Read reviews of different web hosts.

2. Use less Flash. Flash can make your Web site load slower. When someone visits your Web site, he'll have to download the Flash files (known as .SWF files). If you have a large Flash video on your site, your prospect will have to download the whole thing.

3. Use fewer images. Images have to be downloaded when the prospect visits your site. If you have a lot of them, it'll take longer for your site to load.

If you use images, make sure your images use a file type that has a smaller file size, such as .GIF and .JPG. Avoid using bitmap (.BMP) image files because they have a larger file size. Although .GIF and .JPG have a slightly lower quality, they look about as good as .BMP images -– and they download faster.

4. Avoid background music. Avoid playing background music on your Web site. If you have background music, your visitor will have to download the background music file to play it. Plus, playing background music may come across as unprofessional and annoy your visitor.

5. Use efficient web code. This is something your web developer can help you with. If your Web site uses web programming languages (such as PHP), make sure your code is efficient.

If you know programming, then you know that nested for loops is inefficient. If you don't know programming, then have someone help you to make sure your code is efficient.

So be sure your Web site loads quickly. Instead of driving prospects away with a slow site, your prospects will more likely stay and browse your site.