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Usability: Downloading Speed

One of the main reasons for leaving a Web site is slow page downloading. In this issue we'll consider some points to keep in mind to make your site more dynamic. By María José Serres, ARTech's Marketing Team

When a site takes too long to download its information, we feel frustrated, we abandon the site and probably we won't ever visit it again.

Let's think of downloading a page from a website as a telephone conversation. The response time to find the Web address is equivalent to the number of rings and the page's downloading time corresponds to the conversation that takes place. When a page is downloaded very slowly, one element at a time, it's as if the recipient would put you on hold at each reply during a call.

The fastest page within the site should be the home page, generally the most visited one. If one has the site's server statistics and knows which pages are the most visited, that should be the list of pages that should be crucially faster.

The user's response is related to the downloading time in the following manner:

Less than 1 second: The user considers the page downloading almost instantaneous

Less than 5 seconds: Downloading is immediate, it's what the user expects

Up to 10 seconds: Maximum time acceptable

More than 10 seconds:User cancels the downloading process and visits another site

Therefore, the objective is to download pages in less than 10 seconds while offering the largest amount of content information possible so users can access the necessary links to comfortably begin navigating the site.

To make page downloading faster, one has to start by measuring them.

The following tools enable us to know which page components are heavier and take more time to download than others.

http://www.webperf.org/breakdown.html
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/  

To make pages faster I recommend:

1- Eliminate images that could be substituted by text (e.g., menu options).

2- Make images smaller. There are many tools to help with this process:

http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm
http://www.creatingonline.com/crunchers.htm  
http://www.gifworks.com/  

3- Specify all images and tables sizes.

4- Segment pages with too much content in smaller pages.

5- Always use cascading stylesheets (CCS)! It's been proven that using this technology generates less page coding and thus higher downloading speed. In addition, it optimizes the navigator's reading of the generated code.

6- Double-check the page's speed to confirm the objective was attained.

References:
CSS:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/stylesheet_guide/  

 

 

 

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Usability: Colors, Contrast and Underlining
Usability: The Home Page
Usability: Contact us
Usability: Types of Links
Usability: Images
Usability: With or Without Frames?