Quite recently the Google Blog carried a story which included tips for webpage design ^[1], the one point that caught my eye was;

Tip #1: Pass the 8 second test. At first glance, a visitor should understand the purpose of your website within a few seconds. People are busy and have limited attention spans — you want to keep them from hitting the dreaded back button.

This rang some bells in my head and made me relook at how much time this website took to load for users, seeing the results left me unsatisfied, and I started out to do something which would grow readers and make them stay back.

I was successfully able to cut down the load times from about 12 seconds to under 3 seconds, and would like to share those tips with other webmasters who want to optimize their websites for faster load times.

With that, I am kicking off a new series of posts which will teach webmasters to optimize their website and increase their load times, as a part of the series I will be covering several topics, which include but are not limited to;

• How to test website load times.
• How to optimize and compress CSS files
• How to optimize and compress JavaScript files.
• How to GZIP content using Apache .htaccess files.
• Dealing with unwanted things in a WordPress ^[2] installation.
• How to load content and images on demand.
• How to make use of Google Hosted content for faster file serving.
• And any other things readers suggest

As the last point says, I am open to reader suggestions and would love to hear what you want to add to the series, so don’t forget to comment and tell me your suggestions.

I plan to complete this series in the next two weeks, time permitting, however it may be more depending on the time I have and the content queue I have to write about, which is pretty high at this time.

To keep everything organized, all the content in this series will be tagged as Optimize Websites ^[3] so that users can find all the relevant content in one place.