Make Your Site Quick To Load!

December 31, 2007

The time it takes to load your site can make or break a visitor's

first impression of your site. If your site takes too long to load,

the visitor will click "Stop" or "Back" and leave your web site. If

you are a business and offering people important information, it is

critical to have a nice design, with a quick load time.

You may want to check out the load time of your page, to indeed see if

your site loads quick enough for the average user. A great site tool

where you are able to enter your site and it displays a report on the

time it takes to load your site on different connections, in addition

to tips to decrease load time.

Upon doing a speed test, if your first page takes a great time to load

in the visitor's browser, it is in the best interest to do some

redesigning to decrease load time and increase the number of visitors

that will not click back on the browser. We must remember that not

everyone is running on DSL or Cable modem. Many users still dial up

using a 56K connection. As web designers and site maintainers, we want

to ensure our site's load quickly, as to not lose potential visitors

to your site.

Images, Sounds & Animations are the major menaces to download time.

While these add nicely to a site, they may take up a lot of time to

load. If you may avoid large sized files, please do. Many images may

be optimized to look the same, however taking up less space, and

download more quickly. Many image editors such as Adobe Photoshop or

Paint Shop Pro can perform these tasks.

Sounds & Videos should be avoided on your main page, as they take up

most time to load. Keep these for inner pages if possible. Videos and

sound files can be from 100 KB to 1 MB in size or larger. If the user

needs to load a 500 KB video file on a 56 K modem, it will take

upwards to 89 seconds to complete. This definitely could turn the user

away

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