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Everyone wants a website to pull up fast, but how do you make sure your site loads fast? In this article, I'll show you my time tested techniques for getting good statistics, and good reviews on the time it takes to load your website.

There are at least two important ways to measure website speed. First is the amount of time that a page takes to show some content. Secondly, is the time it takes for the entire page to load.

If you design your pages well, your site can partially load and visitors won't even notice that it's not done yet. In order to understand web speed issues, you have to realize that graphics, flash animations, backgrounds and sounds are responsible for nearly all of the delays in loading a typical website. Additionally, it helps to know that websites are drawn on the screen in a specific way, and some site designs can cause your page to be drawn "early" or "late", meaning that you could have nearly all the content downloaded, but nearly nothing showing up on the screen.
Browsers usually don't render (draw) any part of a page unless it's got enough information to fully format the content. HUH? For example, if you have a table full of images, and the images have no set heights or widths, the table will have to download every image, before any of them will show up. In this example, simply give each image a height and width () and the images display one at a time as they are loaded. If you don't know the heights and widths of the images, I've found that the easiest way is to separate your rows into separate tables with defined sizes. Instead of having a 1 table with 4 rows each having 4 cells full of images, you make 4 tables, each with 1 row containing 4 cells of images. Each table will load as it's content is fully downloaded, appearing like each row is loading one at a time. This doesn't just count for tables, it counts for DIV tags, CENTER tags, and many others. Nested tags add to the problem. If you have unsized images inside of a DIV tag, none of the content within the DIV will show up until ALL of the content within the DIV is loaded. The more you can separate your images into separate tags, and use pre-defined image sizes, the faster the page will load. If you follow this technique, you can really make your site appear to load much quicker.

Now, we'll discuss how to actually make your pages actually download quicker. The first step is to optimize your images, which is to say, make them the smallest file size possible. You should not be

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