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/