Web Page Optimization Tips

gaurav.goel's picture
published by gaurav.goel on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 17:42
Here are some points I have used and found useful while working on websites.
  • Design: Check the design of your website on various broswers. Cross Browser Compatibility for Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Opera 7.0 and Netscape Navigator 6+. They constitute 95% of the browsers. 
  • Download Time: Optimize for fast download by optimizing images for their size.
  • Download Time: Remove any extra code and HTML comments.
  • Download Time: Remove unnecessary white spaces.
  • Download Time: Use multiple pages instead of one long page.
  • CSS: Use CSS to layout web pages, not the tables. 
  • CSS: Use CSS from external files. Same style code can be reused in multiple pages this way.
  • CSS: Use CSS to load images. Browsers generally load the images spcified in CSS after loading other content.
  • CSS: Use shorthand notations for CSS.
  • JavaScript: Use javascript from external files. Same JavaScript code can be reused in multiple pages this way.
  • Links: Use relative links instead of absolute paths.
  • Text: Move text out of images as much as possible. This helps in Search Engine Optimization as well as download time.
  • Use DIV tags instead of TABLE tags
  • Validate CSS using http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
  • Validate links using http://validator.w3.org/checklink
  • Validate markup using http://validator.w3.org/
  • SEO: Use Meta tags for Search Engine Optimization. Unnecessary meta tags also addup to the page size. So, avoid unnecessary meta tags.
  • SEO: Use 'Description' meta tag in addition to 'Keywords' meta tag. Usually that is ignored. Search Engines rely more on 'Description' meta tag.
  • SEO: Submit your website to major search engines - Google, Ask, Yahoo, Bing for Search Engine Optimization.
  • SEO: Use more text as HTML text instead of putting in images for Search Engine Optimization.
  • SEO: Consider using hyphens instead of underscores to separate your keywords, domain, directories and filenames. That may help getting better webpage ranking. Google sees hyphens as dividers, it ignores underscores; and hence your webpage will rank higher when searching for those keywords.

 

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