One great tool for you to learn how to use is YSlow. This tool will allow you to be able to monitor how your website is working and the different things that are considered. Overall the down loadable time is able to be improved if you are able to understand this software and how to make improvements.
Another good tip to reduce server load is to actually ask it to do less! Yes, that is right. If you feel that your website is slow and is deterring visitors from staying around, then speed it up by having smaller images and fewer things like flash movies and animated gifs. All these things can take time to download. The images need not be actually smaller on your page, but you can make them take up less space by compressing them so they will load faster. Better still, host them somewhere else. Join a free image hosting website and your server will only make one call to that website, rather than a thousand calls to itself to load up your images.
Another tip to reduce the load is to move your JavaScript files at the bottom of your web page. This may not be always possible but trying does not harm in any way so give it a shot where you can. The way it helps is when a browser reads your web page it has plenty of information to go through in terms of images, CSS and other scripts. By placing the JavaScript at the end the browser first reads the important information and in the end reads the JavaScript which reduces the load.
Can you divide your data in some way? Have some of it on one server and some on another? This way your page will load a lot of things simultaneously as both servers send things to it. Another way is to not try to have too much on your front page. If you have interesting links, then this will also speed up your page transfer.
It is also a good idea to use CSS sprites in order to be able to find different data and to be able to monitor the memory and speed of your computer as well as much memory is being used by the website. - 33376
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