An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
Host Images And Files Somewhere Else Many users online at the same time can cause your server to handle a lot of requests. Its best that if you are using images in your site, make sure you upload them to image host sites like ImageShack. This will greatly reduce the bandwidth used by your server and also make your blog faster as image upload sites have a better speed.
Best place to host files of sizes 2-5mb (Any thing you need to provide users for download) is to use Google Pages as your host.
Also, try Amazon S3 for your core site images.
Optimize Your CSS Nowadays many sites have started to use CSS based formatting. Even if Style Sheets are naturally more efficient than HTML tables you can still optimize the CSS code to make your website cleaner and faster. Having a clean CSS can reduce the time taken by the clients browser to decode your site.
Manual Clean Try to locate dispersed code and aggregate it together.
For example instead of
You can use the tool Clean CSS to optimize your CSS and remove useless property declaration and whitespaces.
Optimize Your Images Use image formats such as PNG, JPG,/JPEG And GIF. Always use the “Save for web†image quality which is available in most softwares such as Adobe Photoshop.
Use Height/Width Tag In Images Most people dont add hieght and width tag to images. These tags make sure that the browser knows the dimensions of images before it has completed downloading the image. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page.
When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page simultaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.
Use Less Javascript! Some people tend to add a lot of javascript effects to their site. Using excessive javascript animations may cause clients browser to freeze for some time annoying the user.
Optimize Links Make sure that the outlinks from your blog and link between posts are optimized well. For example if link is www.domain.com/blog make sure you write it as www.domain.com/blog/ to prevent one extra request which would be made to the server if the former link is used.
The improvement on the loading time of links ending with a slash will not be astronomical, but when it comes to speeding up a website every small bit helps!
Reduce HTTP Requests To Server When opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.
...or use YSlow with Firebug. http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
More on optimizing images: use PureJPEG and PNGOUT to strip down junk metadata from your files. It's free bandwidth, it can't get better than this, folks!