Sometimes it happens that people do not click through to other parts of your website, despite of the fact that your web pages have a great content and good design. This might be because your web pages take a long time to load.

How Fast Does It Need to Be?
Loading time is considered to be one of the most important things that a user notices about a website. Most users prefer to use a page that loads quickly than the one that loads sluggishly, even if the latter has a much better content. Many of them even abandon the website that does not load in less than 10 seconds.

It is true to some extent that in the present age of broadband, the download speed is not much of a criteria. But almost half of the world's population still uses dial-up connections which are comparatively much slower. Due to this, it is important to pay attention to the download speed of your page. It takes 10 seconds on a 56k dial-up connect to download 70 KB data. So your page must be limited to that size.

Reduce Graphics
The first step to reduce the size of your website is to limit the number of graphics to the minimum. There is no need to have graphics at places where the text is self-sufficient. Only the graphics that enhance the information or design of your site should be used.

Compress Your Graphics
After you remove the unnecessary graphics, the existing ones need to be compressed. This can be done by an increase of the JPEG compression, or a reduction in the colors to be used. If the images do not contain too many colors, GIF format can be used. In case your graphics cannot be compressed, resize them to make them smaller in size.

Clean Up Your HTML
HTML codes have a tendency to puff up with unwanted tags, when a WYSIWYG editor or a table is used in the page. Use CSS to design your site as much as possible. You can also used HTML Tidy to clean up the unnecessary HTML. Most of the times, a simple cleaning process is enough to reduce the download size of your pages to half of the original.

Switch Web Hosts
Sometimes it happens that your page takes a long time to load, even when their size is quite small. If that is the case, there might be a problem at the web host's end. Test the speed for different pages. If it is constantly bad, then you need to change your host.

Before you choose the new host, first explore some of the sites that are already hosted by them. This can be done by a search for the “hosted by (host's) name”. Most of the sites mention the host's name on at least one of their pages.