Help with getting website to load faster!

[mommy2mydeer4]

My website has been going through some drastic changes including a drastic increase in daily hits. My main issue - my website is loading VERY slowly!

I have designed it from scratch and have been working on it for two years now. I am not great at web designing but feel like I have done a pretty good job from starting with no knowledge of ANYTHING having to do with websites. Through surveys I have found that my customers rank my website an average of 8 out of 10. Not great!

Please no offers to design my website for me This is something that I really enjoy doing - but all comments and constructive criticism are very welcome. Please remember I am a self taught web designer - so please speak English when giving me suggestions - not HTML lingo...LOL

HELP Please!
Thank you,
Lisa

 

[frankblundt]

i'm not sure how to give you website advice without talking about HTML... it's kind of fundamental.

Some of your images could be compressed a bit more than they are, but your main problem appears to be the amount of code on on each page. You might consider shifting some of the repeating code out into external files that only have to load once and then can be reused for each subsequent page.

You have a lot of javascript in there for example that could be put into a separate .js file and linked to from each page.
Likewise a lot of styling that could be put into a separate .css file and similarly referenced via a link and class="xxx" attributes in the tags.

That would speed things up a lot for dialup users.

 

[Chacala_Nayarit]

It seems the images are taking the most time to load.

For instance the picture frame with flowers image is at 50.73 KB, and then add the other images. The good news is you can shirnk the file size of images by using Photoshop action, "save for Web". I saved the above image form 50.73 KB to 8KB, and it looks fine. If you do not have Photoshop, I can do the images for nada.

Another factor is Yahoo servers can be slow.

However, the site is cute and well done!