Question for my fellow Freepers about Bandwidth.

[theconservativerepublican]

I have a question for my fellow Freepers. As you all know, I run a website www.theconservativerepublican.com I have had some complaints about it opening up to slow, although it opens quicker than Drudge or WorldNetDaily. What ways can I improve the speed? Will investing in more bandwidth make the site any faster?

Thanks Joe

[holymoly]

Doesn't bandwidth simply denote the total amount of data your site may transmit over a given time period, e.g. one gigabyte per day?

There are many factors which can influence site speed, particularly for dial-up users.

The first is content pulled from elsewhere, such as ads, headlines, etc. which are served up by other providers/servers. I.E. It's possible for an ad server (or someones' connection to it) to be slow, which in turn can slow loading of the entire site.

The easist way to increase your sites' speed is to reduce the number of GIFs, JPGs, etc.

Many dial-up users will have average download speeds of only 3-4 K per second. Dropping a few GIFs or JPGs can make quite a difference.

P.S. In regards to your table, you might consider changing "width=869" to "width=100%". This will (should) make your site viewable at any resolution, without horizontal scroll bars.

[kingu]

Your biggest delay for most users will be pulling images off of geocities.com. If you would move those images over to your host website, it would speed things up slightly.

Also there are some empty <span> styles that could be cut out, which would cause overhead for others.

The biggest consideration is the format of the web page which creates a rather huge image in memory by the long empty length. Controlling that would help those who have low amounts of RAM.

In short - move the .gifs that are on geocities to the same host as your page, axe the <td colspan=2 height=3400> (and related) and it should cut down load times right there.