Load Time: How External Files Can Make Your Site Load Faster

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Load time is a significant measure for webmasters. You don’t want your visitors showing up to your site and waiting as it loads. Most visitors won’t stick around long enough to see how long it takes. You we essentially have about 5 to 7 seconds to get their attention. If that time is spent loading your website then you lose that visitor. Also, website load time can play a role as part of your long term search engine optimization effort as well.

There several ways to increase your load time. Making your images smaller will help. Decreasing the number of images you have on your web pages will help. But one very important way to increase your website’s load time is to put extensive code into an external file and reference it in your HTML document. But which parts of your code should you move to an external file?

CSS and Javascript are two pieces of code that are often found in external files. You don’t necessarily have to put every single piece of Javascript into an external file, but if you have a lot of code on your page then moving long stretches of it to its own file will increase your load time significantly. And if you design your website using CSS you’ll want that CSS, called a stylesheet, to be in an external file.

Be careful, though, too many external files will force visitors’ browsers to work harder to find the information they need and you’ll still have load time issues. Two or three external files works best. You likely won’t need more than two stylesheets, but most webmasters can get by with one. And you likely don’t need more than one or two external files for your Javascript. But taking this one step can be a difference between 3 to 5 seconds of load time in many cases.