How Fast Does Your Website Load?

FACT: If your website is too slow, you are going to lose visitors.

When Google asked web users how many search results they would like to have every time they perform a search on Google, they said wanted more. Web users who were polled in a recent Google survey claimed that they would like to have more than 30 search results served at them. However, these users weren’t aware that 30 search results in a page would take twice as much time to load compared to just the standard 10, increasing page load time by half a second.

When the study was completed, Google found out that the traffic to pages with 30 results dropped 20%.

When it comes to page load time, every millisecond counts. People just don’t have the time anymore to wait for a website to load. … even with a half a second difference.

Akamai and Jupiter Research released a study that states:

Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site. This is one of several key findings revealed in a report made available today by Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), commissioned through JupiterResearch, that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience.

And the study also found that load speed was more important that many site owner’s realize

The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

Here are some tips on how to improve your web page load time.

1. Test your website

Web Page Time Tester is a cool web tool that you can use to test how much time does it take a web page on your site to load. When you enter a URL, it will test the load time of all the contents on that page. The test will also give you a breakdown of the individual page elements and objects on your web page. The load time of all the object in the submitted URL will be shown visually with time bars.

You can also try WebPageTest. WebPageTest is a web tool developed by AOL to test their web pages. Made available to the public in 2008, WebPageTest is under active development by several companies and community contributors on Google code.

2. Trim your website, remove unnecessary eye candies

When you develop a web site, make sure that you don’t put too much flashy stuff in it. Building your website entirely in flash will significantly increase load time, resulting to fewer visitors. Strip your website of unnecessary decorations.

3. Use thumbnails

If you are running a photography website or any other site that features large image formats, use thumbnails. Small images are faster to load compared to large ones.