The way you see your website and the way that your visitors see it just isn't the same. This is particularly true when it comes to page loading speeds. If you are constantly using the same browser to test your website you are not doing yourself any favours and you are not getting the true picture of your website's loading speed which is partly due to cookies. Browsers remember images and text from websites that you have previously visited, so the next time you load the same page, half of it is already in your browser's memory, making it load faster than the last time. So you should at the very least change this action by testing your website on at least two or more browsers to get a true indication of page loading speed.

If you find that your web pages are loading rather slowly you're going to have to take some action to rectify the problem. In the following few paragraphs I'll go over a few tips you can use to improve the overall visitor experience. By making amendments to your website you'll also find that it will most likely help with search engine rankings as page speeds are one of the ranking factors.

So first of all make sure that the posts on your home page are not displayed in their full length. Anything longer than 300 words should have a 'Read More' link at the bottom, so that those who wish to read the entire content can continue doing so on another page. Shortening the content on your home page will stop visitors from having to go through endless scrolling in order to see all the previous posts that have been made. Any pictures that your posts may contain should only be displayed on a separate page once a visitor clicks on the 'Read More' link.

Take a good look at your website and see if there's anything that can be removed. Any images, gif or banner which are used purely for decorative purposes need to be removed. Now if it is not useful in attracting visitors or being used towards high quality content, then it is not needed. Besides if your website looks cluttered, it will be a lot harder for people to find whatever they are looking for.

Make sure that all your HTML and CSS codes are done right, without wasting too much bandwidth space and cut out any blank spaces that your coding doesn't need. Blank spaces are 'space' marks, and even those can take up a tad bit more loading time than your visitor has patience for. Take a little more time to learn the proper way to code your website. Is it possible to create the same code with 40 characters instead of 89? If so, do it because the more space your content takes up the more potential there is for the pages to slow down. And once you reach the point where everything is being clogged by small mistakes, it may turn out to be a real pain to get everything sorted out and will probably take you days rather than hours to fix.

Take care not to place images that are pointlessly too big. There are plenty of online editors you can use to crop and reshape images that will take up less space than their original versions. A standard high quality image is about 5 MB, and is usually the size of a desktop wallpaper. There is no way that this image will fit inside your website without distorting it, so take a few minutes to cut it down. If you really feel like your visitors should have the option of enjoying the image in its full glory, add a link to where they can download it, don't hog up precious space.

The more organised your website is, the faster it will load. Before you start believing that your work is done, make sure that you first check it with other browsers, and even ask someone else to check it for you on their computer. There are also websites you can use which offer browser checking services which may be the best option if you are prepared to pay a nominal fee.

If you have your website on a free or shared hosting plan and you find that your website is loading slowly despite making the other changes then it might be a good idea to either upgrade or even change your hosting provider to a new one instead. There are plenty of web hosting sites to choose from but one which stands out in this regard is http://www.serverspace.co.uk. They make every effort to make sure that their shared and dedicated hosting plans satisfy even the most demanding of websites.

So there are a few options you can take to improve the overall visitor experience with faster loading pages that make all the difference.