If you have a popular site, then you might notice some problems occur. Typically the site may slow down, you may have excessive bandwidth charges, and people start to complain that your site is taking too long to load. What can you do?

Image Review

The first step should be to review any images you have on your pages. Ensure that these are JPG or GIF format, and only as big as necessary in terms of their physical dimensions. Reduce image size by reducing the quality - for instance with JPGs even a quite compressed image will still be fine for the web.

You can probably quite comfortably half image sizes and without any big reduction in quality.

Flash and Animation

If you have Flash and animation on your site, or any chunky items being downloaded each time a page is hit, consider if you really need them - and if so, consider compacting and reducing the size of these elements.

Web site code

Check your code and ensure that it is efficiently and well written. If you have any comments in your code then take these out. Just reducing the code bloat of your site can save a few Kb each time your page is hit - and across tens of thousands of hits a day, that can save you a lot of money in bandwidth charges.

Introduce script timers

If you have a dynamic site or one that uses levels of scripting, benchmark your scripts and find which are the slowest and where the slow points are. You can then look for ways to optimise your code to ensure that these delays are minimised.

Page Cacheing

Depending on your site, it may be wise to think about more sophisticated elements such as whether you allow your pages to be cached or not for each visit - again this can help with download times and reduce server strain.

Dan Moore is Director of Clarity Media Limited, a web design company and puzzle supplier of such smash hit puzzles as sudoku, kakuro, hanjie and codewords