Size Does Matter!

By Matt Colyer
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2004

In this article we will be looking at why you should keep your web page size small.

As any good webmaster knows you should keep the web page size small, but why? It's really simple, both spiders and visitors hate web pages that take forever to load because it's harder to spider the web page or for the visitor they just don't have time to wait for your web page to come up, after all most web sites are not that great, so why wait if your the visitor?

You should keep images down in size, the best way to do this is with image compressors. Image compressors will crush the size to make it load faster, but there is a down side to using image compressors because they can make the image colors look like they are out of place and horrible looking. The best way to prevent this is by only doing this to images that are not photos instead this should be used on art work images and try to use the image compressors on images that are smaller, so it's harder to see the image colors out of place.

A web page should use more HTML than images because this helps cut down the size of your web page. Web pages also should not be too wide or long. Instead cut the web page into two or three web pages, this will also help your visitors not to be forced to scroll down the web page to much and help them scan (Most surfers scan pages for the info they are looking for.) the page better to find the information the visitor is most interested in.

Flash can really slow web pages down even worse robots can't read Flash and if your visitors don't have high speed (Most Internet users still use dial up.) Internet it can take forever to load, like I said at the top who is going to wait to just see your web page when they can visit someone else's site with almost the same information as your sites? Flash really looks great and can really make your site look outstanding, but there are other ways to make your site look great without Flash. If you have to use Flash try to make/get one that loads fast on dial up and don't use a lot of it on your web site.

Java scripts can put a major load on your server and slow it down. Robots can't read Java scripts and robots dislike Java scripts. What makes me mad about some web designers is when they use Java clocks, if the visitors need to know what time it is they can look at the clock on the left side of their computer and even if the computer doesn't have one they can look at the clock in their house, it's that simple with the Java clocks you don't need one on your site!

You should try to keep your web page size between 10K and at the most 30K, so both the spiders are happy and most important your visitors are happy.

About The Author

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network which includes (www.linkexchangeit.com) and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.