My website is really slow. Why? What can I do to have it loading faster? Why should I optimize my website and what changes will I notice if I do so?

Chapter 1: Why are iWeb sites so slow to load?

Chapter 2: How can I make them loading faster?

Chapter 3: How do I optimize my website?

Chapter 4: Other reasons for optimizing your website

Chapter 1: Why are iWeb sites so slow to load?

iWeb created websites are really graphic intensive websites. The themes and templates are made out of a lot of graphics (images, ...) which make the websites huge and make them being slow. A lot of people complain that their iWeb created websites are slow and their visitors get annoyed of waiting for the pages to load on their browsers (especially people with a slow internet connection).

Chapter 2: How can I make them loading faster?

If you publish to MobileMe you could publish your website to real hosting to have the website loading much faster than it does now. That’s because MobileMe’s servers are really slow in general. To know which hosting to use and how it works have a look at the Publishing and hosting FAQ.

If you already publish your website to a good hosting and still feel like the site is too slow or you want to keep it on MobileMe you could optimize it with one of the applications mentioned in Chapter 3. By optimizing the website with one of these applications the graphics’ size (in Megabytes) is reduced which makes the websites loading faster.

Chapter 3: How do I optimize my website?

The best way to optimize a website is using an application which does the job for you. You simply publish the website to MobileMe or to a folder and run the whole website through the application.

At the moment there are basically two applications which can be used for that.

WebCrusher is a really good piece of software which makes your pages pages much lighter hence loading faster without seeing any loss of quality in the images and the pages in general. My english version of the iWeb FAQ has a size of 52,1 MB (made of 1765 files), after I run it through WebCrusher the size was 28,1 MB. It saved 24 MB which is about 46% of the original size of the website! This without any noticeable change in its appearance. No noticeable loss in quality of the pictures, ...

The only downsides are that it’s quite expansive and it took about 20 minutes to optimize the whole website due to the fact that I have a lot of pages on my website (above average for iWeb websites I guess). So for me it’s not a good idea to run the whole website through it every time I publish. It’s better to just run in on the changed pages. For most of you it will process your site faster.

I love it because it’s really easy and straight forward to use and I think the results are excellent (46% less in size) but I hope it will get faster.

I would give it a good 4 stars rating out of five. If you want to buy WebCrusher click here.

I wasn’t given the chance to try it yet but it’s often recommended by the great Roddy McKay known as “Roddy” in the Apple iWeb Discussion Forums. If you want to buy Web Site Maestro click here.

Chapter 4: Other reasons for optimizing your website

The iWeb generated codes are a little dirty which means that there are some useless codes in it. These pieces of dirty code are sometimes referred to for being responsible for compatibility issues with some browsers (especially some versions of InternetExplorer).

Both the applications mentioned above clean the website of the unneeded codes increasing compatibility and speed.

iWebFAQ.org - Tutorials, Tips & Tricks is made with iWeb and for iWeb.

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- Cédric -