We've all heard the phrase "Speed Kills", but in the world of cyberspace it should be, "Lack of Speed Kills". What does lack of speed kill? Traffic to your site. After all, your visitors are the lifeblood of your web site. Without visitors, there really is no point to having a web site. In the previous two articles I dealt with domain names and search engines. Both of those topics were related in that they both were trying to improve the ease in which a prospective visitor finds your site. Assuming that they have found a link to your site on a search engine or even noted it from your business card or other medium, will they get to your content immediately or suffer a long wait? Many will argue that content is more important than speed. To a point, I agree. However, if the page doesn't load quickly or you have put up obstacles to your content, they more than likely will use their browser's "Back" button and go elsewhere. Of course, even if your page loads quickly, if you don't have any interesting content, they will go elsewhere anyway. Visitors are used to not finding what they want on a site. They therefore have little patience waiting for a site to load that probably doesn't have what they want. I'm going to assume that your content is riveting or that you have the best "widget" to sell. It will be important for the visitor to reach your content as quickly as possible. You may now be wondering what contributes to your site's load time. Here are the main attributes that can affect your load time: - The visitors' connection mode. In this age of high-speed broadband, the vast majority of people still use dial-up modems rather than DSL and cable. Even cable modems can slow down to dial-up speeds depending on the current demand of customers sharing their network node.
- The visitor's computer and browser. Many people still surf the internet with Windows 95 using an old version of Netscape or Internet Explorer.
- Your web host's server speed and connection to the internet. Generally, most professional servers are fast and have considerable bandwidth to the internet.
- General network congestion. From time to time, certain parts of the internet will bog down much as vehicle traffic can at rush hour. You may have heard of denial-of-service attacks on various large web sites. This is nothing more than a concerted effort to commandeer computers to all contact a specific web site repeatedly. It creates so much congestion that the legitimate visitor cannot get to the web site.
- The file size of your web page. This is made up of the page's coding, images and other files that need to download.
Of these major attributes, you have the most, and arguably only, control over your page's file size. In most cases, the source code is negligible in size. However, I have seen some sites whose source code alone was larger than some home page's overall size. Images are the biggest culprit. High-resolution photos are very pretty, but if they are not essential to the site, they do nothing more than eat up valuable load time. Most images can be optimized to still be viewable while being small in file size at the same time. Optimizing images is a topic in itself that I will address in the near future. I also mentioned "other files". Some people put audio on their pages. This can be another source of load time. Don't forget advertising, banners and counters. All are detrimental to your load speed. You or your webmaster have control over all of these factors. Now, you may be wondering just what is fast? To give you some idea of how file size relates to speed, I'll give you some examples. Google's current file size is about 12,000 bytes. This equates to loading in about 3 and a half seconds for a visitor using a 56k dial-up modem. The same page will load in just over half a second using DSL. Google's page is very sparse and it has mainly one purpose, for you to enter a search term. Most sites will want some more content as well as navigation and would probably want it to be a bit more interesting to view. In comparison, my current home page is about 34,000 bytes. It takes less than an estimated 10 seconds to load on a 56k modem and less than 2 seconds using a DSL at T1 speed (1.5 meg. downstream). "Fast" is somewhat subjective. I would aim for less than 15 seconds for the average visitor using a 56k dial-up modem. That would put the page size under 50KB. Some sites use what is known as a "splash" page. A splash page is a page that usually has a large logo and an "enter" button, if not just a giant "enter" button in itself. Some are very fast loading. So, you may think that this is the answer to having a quick loading page. Not so fast (pun intended)! Splash pages do very poorly with search engines as they are generally made up of an image which the search engines cannot index. Without actual text as content, search engines and the human visitor find little relevant content. Recently, splash pages have evolved into commercials with elaborate "Flash" (a Macromedia application) animations that may require a plug-in or special browser to view. I call splash pages "Ego" pages. Both the simple splash page and the animated one serve to create yet another barrier between your visitor and your site's content. The visitor still must get to the actual "Home" page to find out just what your site offers. I promise to rant about splash pages in a future article. Another barrier that some sites use is the requirement that you must register before using the site. I don't know about you, but unless there is something I really need, I'm not registering for anything. I currently receive about 200 spam e-mails a day. I don't need more, nor do I need to go through the hassle of registering just to discover that I don't like the site. Lastly, there is the webmaster that puts the equivalent for the following statement on the site, "Best viewed on my computer using my browser at ‘X' by ‘X' resolution, a lightening fast broadband connection and these plug-ins...". Seriously, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is going to download a special version of a browser nor a plug-in just to view your site. They won't even go as far as changing the viewing dimensions, even if they know how to do so. It's so much easier to just click on the "Back" button. Don't be fooled by your browser's cache. The cache holds images that will load from your computer the next time you visit the same page. So, if you are working on a your web site and think that it's loading fast, it may just be loading form the cache, not the actual server. Clear your cache and try it again. Also, certain ISPs (internet service providers) such as AOL use a cache and compression in addition to your browser. It is important that you know your pages' file sizes and their corresponding load times. In closing, design a page that gets the visitor to your content as quickly as possible while still being interesting. This entails optimizing and limiting images, not requiring special plug-ins or browsers, no splash pages, no useless audio files and limiting the page to a reasonable length. Of course, there are always exceptions, but these are good guidelines to follow. Keywords: faster pages About the Author
Dan Prinzing, Encinitas, CA, USA
dan@drtandem.com
http://www.DrTandem.com
Dan Prinzing, a.k.a. DrTandem, specializes in designing affordable websites for small businesses. He also offers free advice as well as critiques for current websites. |
