2 Web Design Tips To Speed Up Your Load Times

Blogs have become one of the major sources communication with the advent of Web 2.0. There are a few different blogging platforms around, most of which rely on PHP to control the behind the scenes action. Trouble is, PHP is quite slow and needs to be interpreted before your page can load to the screen. These blog design tips may help to speed things up just a little.

Blog Design Tip 1: Convert your Header to HTML.
Whenever anyone accesses your website, their browser will call the main file – normally index.php. This file is written in PHP which is nothing more than a set of instructions. It loads all the information required to produce to page to the screen; translates it to HTML and sends it back to the browser.

The browser takes the HTML code and renders the page to the visitors screen. Some of the information doesn’t require converting, or rather, doesn’t need to be in PHP to begin with.

If you access your page source code you will see that it is all in HTML. A lot of the information in the Header section can be copied and pasted into your index.html file to replace the PHP file. Meta information, keywords, site name, these can all be copied and pasted over the relevant PHP code.

Generally speaking, you can also copy the header graphics information. If you have page menus at the top of the screen then you may need to take care. Always make a backup of the files before starting.

Blog Design Tip 2: Convert your Footer to HTML.
I could just say ditto here of course. The same applies to your footer. Most of the information there is stable and never changes yet it is generated in PHP. Remove the php and replace it with the HTML code from view screen file.

These two blog design modifications can actually save several seconds in generating  pages. If you have a lot of graphics or videos then time is going to be important. Optimize the blog deisng of your header and footer and gain a couple of seconds load time.