new web site loads slower than the old

quartzy · Joined: 26 Dec 2007 Posts: 413

hello, I have a new website www.bytesizeoffice.co.ukwhich was made using HTML and CSS, however, it seems to load slower than my old website. Does anyone know why? it has the same amount of pictures but a few new pages, it is frustrating as I thought CSS would make my site load faster.

madprof · Joined: 26 Jan 2008 Posts: 98

Sadly CSS does not do much to make your site load faster. It makes it easier to maintain and look attractive, enabling you to do things with the look that would be impractical otherwise. It *could* make it faster if you had oodles of styles but you don't.

The big thing is images, which dwarf text. They take up nearly 100K of the 130K total for the homepage in your case. I'd recommend shrinking the size of some of them such as the 25K top image.

The arrow image used in the left menu is very big for such a tiny thing too. Not sure how it got to be 12K but maybe save it with a 16-colour palette or something?

But you're only really worrying about any of this with people on dial-up modems. Broadband users will have more than enough bandwidth to download the site in a reasonable amount of time. Amazon's homepage, as an example, is way larger than yours. They do use content compression but that has next to no effect on images when they are already compressed.

quartzy · Joined: 26 Dec 2007 Posts: 413

HELLO again
OK I will have to work on shrinking the size of the images. I have cable and firefox and even that takes ages to download, well some seconds, when I thought it would be instant, like some other sites I see,
even with images. The quality of my header I reduced but I will have to save it as a gif and see if that helps. But thanks for getting back to me, do you think slicing images helps? By the way I carried out all your suggestions, need more now. Once I have done the images.

madprof · Joined: 26 Jan 2008 Posts: 98

This isn't really something that applies to this forum (CSS) so I'll reply in the images one as it is probably of more use there.