Hiring A Skilled Designer Can Lower Your Hosting Costs

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Sep 20, 2007

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Everyone wants to hire a designer whose visual design skills make jaws drop. But most people never consider the HTML coding skills of their website designer an important factor when choosing a design firm. As long as the site looks good, does it really matter how the designer constructs the HTML code? If you answered "No", you'd better read on.

Yesterday one of our hosting clients contacted me to ask for help improving their website's download speed. They'd recently redesigned their site (they didn't meet us until after they'd already hired another firm), but the new site now loads noticably slower than their previous website, and their customers are complaining. So Donovan and I dug in and here's what we found:

1. The total size of the home page alone is 485kb -- that's nearly half a megabyte!
2. The site loads news feeds from CNN.com and MSNBC.com and weather feeds from WeatherChannel.com
3. There is nearly 200kb of JavaScript code downloaded to each page
4. The site loads a rather large Flash movie at the top of every page
5. The HTML code alone on the home page is 140kb

This is a moderately busy website with roughly 2,500 to 3,000 visitors per day. During the first 19 days of September, the website's total bandwidth usage was 191GB! It's important to note that this is not a video sharing website, there are no MP3 downloads and very few PDFs or other large documents.

It's a broadband world, what's the problem?

For visitors with broadband connections, 485kb isn't too much of a problem to download, it might take a couple of seconds. But what about dial-up users (yes, they're still the majority)? The dial-up user is going to wait 10 to 20 seconds for each page to load, and that's not going to be a happy 10 to 20 seconds.

Now, what if 20 users simultaneously visit the site? Suddenly the web server is pumping out about 10MB, so let's just add 25% additional download time. Another 1/2 a second for a broadband user isn't noticable, but another two to five seconds for the dial-up user is definitely painful.

So the user experience is going to take a hit, but where does the hosting cost come into play here?

Most hosting plans provide a maximum monthly data transfer amount that is included in your base plan, and you'll pay a per-gigabyte fee for anything above that max. Suppose that your monthly max is 50GB with a $1.00 per-gigabyte additional fee and you're the lucky owner of the website above. That site is using about 10GB of data transfer each day, so at the end of the month, it should be at about 300GB and incur an additional $150/month fee.

What's the solution?

Hire a skilled designer who understands the importance of code optimization. Ask him to explain his process for streamlining code and for testing. If your designers work in-house, provide them a budget for training, books and time to study better coding practices.

If you've got a problem site right now, here are a few suggestions to shrink your page load size & time:

• Rather than using tables for layout, use CSS
• Avoid inline style formatting and instead use a CSS files
• Split your large CSS files into several smaller ones so that you can call them only on the pages necessary
• Watch your JavaScript code to make sure that you're not calling functions on pages where they're not used
• Streamline your HTML and CSS code to make sure you're not using bytes unnecessarily