How long does your home page take to download?

[Baggs]

Do you know? I didn't and checked at .

The page I was looking at took about 45 seconds on a 56.6 modem . Using DSL I never think about the multitudue still on dial up, but I know that I woudln't wait that long.

The site recomends 8 seconds is the target.

I have managed to shave this down to about 25 seconds now after an hour or so optimisation. Hopefully I will get some feedback in the traffic logs.

(Just testing Lynn's page at http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com takes 27 seconds or so

[Lynn Terry]

[stephfoster]

My page is a bit slow, but I have it set up so that my text loads early on, so visitors can start reading quickly. Next comes the navigation. I still need to make it so that the very top of my pages loads last, since that's graphics and not so important in a lot of ways. I'm much more concerned that a visitor be able to see my information immediately than just about anything else.

I use CSS for just about everything on my page. That way, all the fonts and everything can be external, and easily made consistent from page to page. That really shrunk the sizes of my pages, and made design easier as well.

[Lugie]

[Anita DeFrank]

Well, let's just say my main site is in some serious trouble! I think I need to reduce some of my graphics on my home page

Anita

[robert adams]

hi Anita, I was going to see if I could help you with your logo graphic.
I am on a very fast cable connection, and I watched the logo load which means it is very slow on 56k
I downloaded it and tried to open it in PSP but it is not a good jpg file so I can't open it.

It is 240kb is size, since it only has a couple of colors, you could probably reduce that down considerably by reducing the number of colors in the image.

I just noticed how many graphics you have on the front page. You could optimize them all and probably speed up your site a lot.

check out this link to info about it:
http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm

luck,
robert

[karadawn]

[nsusa]

None of my business websites needs more than 9.8 seconds to load. For me - that is sufficient enough.

240 KB for an image on a website? That's a killer. Bring it down to 24 KB maximum - rather 12-20 KB if possible. Macromedia Fireworks offers a nice tool - you take an image and specify the file size for the export (GIF,png, or JPG). Also look at the actual image size. Example. The size on the html page used, is 400 X 200 but the actual image size is 1024 x 768. That's where your file size can be .....

Christoph

[sgrptch]

20 on 56k not too bad since I really have a lot of junk that could be taken out etc. I think I can work it down to 8

[Tim Baxa]

Kara , your site took me about 2 seconds to load.

[ldylion214]

[onlineleben]

Checked two of my main sites and got following values for 56 k connections:

site a) 2.71 seconds
site b) 6.32 seconds incl. Amazon iframe

Whatever you do, make your homepage as fastloading as possible. You don't need that much spped on subsequent pages as the user already is accustomed to your site.
Also re-use graphics to speedup download time.

[Lynn Terry]

Looking at this confirms my assumptions - the Clickalyzer code is my culprit Hmmm... It would be really tough to trade off all of that data for faster load time, but it definitely needs to be addressed. I think I'll write to Carl and see if he can come up with any solutions...

[onlineleben]

Clickalyzer could really be a reason or slowloading pages. That was one of the reasons I didn't continue my 7 day test.

An other one:
use external CSS style sheet and also external Javascript.
This causes the sourcecode files to load only once (they are kept in the browsers cache) and not getting reloaded with every single page.
Big improvement!

[ldylion214]