decrease traffic load?

Hello!

I would like to know if anyone has some tips regarding traffic load.
My website consists of a graphical header with buttons and a large news section through which visitors can browse. When they click a newsheader the page reloads (with www.page.com?newsid=34) - since an average visitor clicks 40 newsitems the page reloads 40 times placing a heavy load on my webserver. Is there any way to do something about this? I don't want to use frames :| So that is not really an option...

any tips are more than welcome!

regards,

P3x

i dont know much about programing but i would imagine that if you used templates that might help your problem.

or, i know you said no frames but what about IFRAME.

Neither templates nor frames is going to solve your problem. If a person clicks a link, causing a page to load, a request will be issued to the Web server, causing server load. There's no way around this simple fact. After the first load, even the images are cached and won't be reloaded on subsequent page loads, so frames wouldn't even help cut out that overhead.

Short of loading all articles in a DIV or IFRAME and displaying the one somebody clicks on (clearly problematic from the user's load time standpoint and by no means scalable) without reloading the page, you've got no real out.

You might consider reworking your user interface so that it helps users find the content they want with fewer clicks. Do you have a site search engine that'll let them narrow down their interests? Do you have your articles browsable by category and subcategory?

hence the disclaimer, sorry for the bum info.

thanks dhouston

P3x, do you really mean server load (which usually refers to CPU cycles and RAM usage), or are you referring to BANDWIDTH USAGE. Which is something completely different.

There's a few things you can do:
Ensure all images are as compressed as possible.
Ensure you HTML code is a lean as possible. No unecessary tables, tags, etc.

As dfano mentioned, once a user has viewed your site once, all images willl be cached on the USERS machine, thereby reducing the bandwidth used.

i wish i had known that, i need to pass that credit to dhouston. the other D.

thanks anyway,

If your content is not dynamic, then most items will be cached on the users machine. This includes the actual HTML file, images, flash files, CSS files, JS files, etc. Essentially all the pieces that go into making a website. This happens because of the way the WWW works. You don't actually view a site off the server that's hosting it - your browser DOWNLOADS the pages/assets (images etc) you request.

Sometimes, this process may not be what you want to happen. e.g. when you post news articles to a page, hourly or daily. In this case, you need to set a meta tag in your source that tells your browser (no cache, expires) to go and get a new copy from the server each time the file is requested by you.

thanks a lot for all that info, and I meant the bandwith, not the server load Sorry for that! Also, Im considering to add a site search engine to my site so people can easily find what they are looking for! Thanks for that suggestion!

Regards,

P3x

Have you had a close look at your navigation system? Unless you have oodles of data like the MS site, your navigation system should be a sufficient method of finding info.

A search engine is only good for things like finding articles.