There are those who don’t understand that you download content every single time you visit a website. It’s true that in order for the digital media to be displayed on your screen things such as images and even text need to be downloaded. Ironically there are many web surfers that swear up and down they will never do any sort of downloading and they have no idea that this is precisely what they are doing every time they go to a website! Funny as that is, it also needs to be taken into account that because downloading is the process that occurs, files on the site need to be very small so that the load times are cut down, which is one of the best things you can do for website optimization.

In doing this, a person’s visit to a website will be made much more tolerable and may even guarantee return visits.

The first thing you can do is reduce the size of images. Images often take up the most space on a web, and even though they are required to enhance the overall user experience, there are steps that you can take to ensure that they download properly on the user end. In the old days the trick was to reduce the amount of colors in the image, but in today’s world that just won’t work. The best thing you can do is use a graphic design program to convert all of your web images to.png. This format is extremely small, and is perfect for website content.

Hosting video can really boost a site’s popularity but you should take care to make sure that you are not hosting the video directly on your main server because this will also cause bandwidth issues. Host the video either offsite, or have it streamed by a third party. By doing this you will tremendously reduce the strain on your site. The one catch to this is the fact that you need to constantly make sure that all of your linked or streaming videos are still working because you will have a lot of disappointed users if they are not.

If you are finding that you are receiving more traffic that you had thought then you should also go ahead and distribute your content out amongst various servers. In this you can be sure that content is streamed by the server that has the least load meaning that users will get their page up as quickly as possible.

If you want to offer physical downloads such as games or other types of media then these should also be allocated to different servers. The best part about doing this is the fact that you can have users sign up for paid accounts which will give them access to higher transfer speeds and exclusive content.

The next thing that you can do is what is known as keyword optimization, or SEO. This is the act of placing specific keywords in your meta tags, alt tags or even your page itself that people will search for.

Setting up a decent website is never hard, though optimizing it so that it will be usable can be. To easy the pain of this difficult process you can employ the help of a professional or seek out one of the many tutorials on the internet. However you do it, so long as you keep performance in mind, you’re certain to have a decent website.