I have heard this statement from everyone who are interested in designing a website. Who would want a website that after you click, you can go and make yourself a coffee while waiting for the website to load.

In this article, I will try and explain concepts of how to make a website load faster in simple English.

There are two factors that influence how fast your website loads.

Firstly, from the point of the users visiting the website, their computer specifications and speed of their internet connection, whether it is a dialup or a broadband. Second is from your point, as the owner of the website, your design, and the server your website is hosted on. You really don’t have much say about the first factor (from the users point), as you cannot ask visitors to get faster computers or subscribe to higher speed internet connection. Let’s make changes to your side of the requirements.

These requirements are categorised into three main topics – website design, specification of the hosting server and physical location of the server.

Website Design
While designing your website, try and minimise the use of flash and images as they take much more time to load than text. For optimising speed, you could implement concepts like making your buttons text based rather then using images. At the same time, you wouldn’t want the website for your business to consist of text only, as that would make it boring. What I wish to emphasise is to have a balance of text and graphics, so that your website is appealing and at the same time loads fast.

Specification of hosting server
Once your website design is ready, it is time to start searching for a hosting company. When selecting your hosting company, there are a few questions you should ask before signing up. Ask them what software they provide and if your programming language is compatible with the server. What is the server’s hardware specification? Ask them for example of some sites hosted on the server and notice how fast they load. You should check their loading speed during different times of the day. If you check a site at night you may notice that it loads fast but if you check this site during working hours it maybe slower as many people could be viewing the website at the same time.

Physical location of the server
Most people seem to have fair knowledge about the above two points and that is good. Physical location of your server is also very important in terms of loading. If your target audience are from the local area, within the state or mainly Australia, then you should seriously consider hosting your website on a server located in Australia. There are many Australian hosting companies but usually their servers are located in datacenters in the US. Datacenter is a place where servers are housed for reliability and security. As a potential customer, you should ask where their server is located physically, or if you wish to be specific, ask them where the location of the datacenter is.

Let’s take two servers with same specification and same website design, one located in Australia and the other located in the US. From my personal experience I have seen the websites on servers located in Australia load much faster for Australian clients. Website on the server located in US may load fast for visitors from the US but this is no use to you if your target audience are from Australia.

You may have come across websites with a fair amount of graphics but still loading fast. If you do a bit of research, you will notice that it is most likely hosted on the server in Australia.

If you take the above points into consideration when setting up a website, you will have a site that will provide users with an enjoyable browsing experience, and they can have a relaxing coffee break after that.

[+/-] About the Author
Suraj Rai is a web consultant with NETable with over 5 years experience in the web industry and manages projects at NETable.

The above article is an expression of author’s personal views. Any individual or organization wishing to excerpt and/or re-use article from this website, must contact the author for permission and reprint requirements. Content on this article may not be used for any commercial purpose or personal use without the express written permission of the author.