Ok everyone, lets stop and read. OP is doing what I think is plain, bulk silica gel column chromatography. Not HPLC.
OP, are you using reverse phase silica gel? That would be somewhat common for sugars, but kinda expensive. As someone mentioned before, also for sugars, Ethyl acetate/hexanes is usually not polar enough to elute such molecules. That is a solvent system more suited to greasier fully synthetic molecules, like say, benzophenone. Often acetonitrile, methanol, dichloromethane, even small amounts of water or acetic acid are part of the elution system for sugars. Are you following a procedure or trying to develop one yourself? Even if you are trying to create one, looking in the sugar synthesis literature for solvent systems other people use would probably be very useful for crafting you own.
Are you testing eluents on TLC paper with a stain? Otherwise you are working blindly on the full scale each attempt.
To get back to your original question, this is how a gradient silica gel column is run, say from 0% ethyl acetate/100% hexanes to a 50:50 mix.
I would disperse my silica gel in hexanes, then run most of the solvent out of it. Then I add a few hundred mL more hexanes to and run it down to <1 cm above the silica gel pack the column. Some people repeat this. I'd add some sand as a physical buffer for splashing and then drip on my crude product onto the sand. I run that product into the silica gel then carefully add a couple hundred mL more hexanes on top of that and run down to the silica gel. Then I make 10:90 EtOAc/hexanes and add that on top, and run most of it down. Then 20:80, add that on top etc, etc, until im adding 50:50 mixture and finish my column at that ratio.