Dec 13 2008
What Do You Do??
What do you do, when a web page you haven’t visited before, takes forever to load? Do you sit and wait for it to load? Maybe go get a cup of coffee and remember the good old days of the 300 baud modem? (I know I am giving away my age with that one!) Maybe you keep a book near your computer so you can read a chapter or two while the page loads? Are you kidding??? If you are like most web surfers, a page has 10 seconds max, then you are off to something quicker.
I know that slow loading websites are one of my pet peeves. Especially when I sit and watch them load widget after widget after widget. Some of the worst offenders are the video blogs. (Please, if you have a video blog, please limit the number of posts on your front page! All those videos take time to load!)
Now, your web site might be as slow as molasses in winter, and it is possible that you don’t even know it! You see, many of your images and posts will be cached on your computer, making it seem to you that your page loads very fast. You might have a faster than normal internet connection, so what seems like instant to you, is actually 30 seconds to the rest of the world!
There is a way to find out how fast your webpage is. Web Page Analyzer will analyze your webpage for speed, and give you a report on ways you can speed up your page load. I have run a few of my sites through the analyzer and have found I have a lot of work to do to speed things up! However, things are never as simple as they seem. Many of the items that slow your page load, actually make your page more interesting. I ran the home page of Web Page Analyzer through their own analyzer and found that the site is actually amazingly fast. Even with a connection speed of just 28.8K, their site loaded in under 10 seconds. However, the page itself is pretty boring. No images, and very little formatting. Just a list of post that I certainly wasn’t tempted to read. There just wasn’t anything there to catch my eye.
So what do you think? How do you find the perfect balance between making your page interesting and useful, while at the same time making sure it loads before your readers pass on to the next life…I mean website.
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Yes, I do remember 300-baud modems since I bought my first home computer in 1978. I was beginning to think that I was the only one. Thanks for the info.