The not so complete consensus on the internet is that a web page needs to load in around 4 seconds or less before you can start to lose visitors. Some visitors will sit and wait no matter how long the site takes to load, but on average if your pages are climbing past that 4 second mark then your visitors could be getting impatient.
One very cool tool to test page load is the “Full Page Test” from Pingdom. The test will take a url, and test the load time for all of the content on that page. The test will even give you a breakdown of the individual page elements (such as images, flash, javascript, and more), with individual file sizes, and how long each one is taking to load.
One other really great tool that I’ve been using for page loads (as well as search engine optimization, etc.), is WebCEO. WebCEO has a nifty “Auditor” Feature that can scan your website and generate a slick looking report with all kinds of useful information, including page load times, and slow pages.
I’ve also been using the “network monitoring” feature of the Firebug AddOn for Firefox, to test my page load times. It took some optimization on my end (less flash, smaller/local images, less javascript, and some caching), but all of my websites should now be under that 4 second mark.
What can you do to boost your web page load times?
Trim the Fat - Make sure that if you are using images on your site that they have been optimized for the web. Also make sure that if you are using any javascript, ajax, flash, or otherwise, that you optimize your code and filesizes to make it easier on load times.
Do it with CSS - Are you using lots of images to get a good looking website? Can you do the same or similar with CSS? Many sites that I come across try to use all kinds of fancy images to create a nice looking interface. The problem here is every image is extra time spent loading that page, not to mention many sites that are using images for their interface have reverted to using tables in their designs in an attempt to make their layout work cross-browser. Menus are a big one here in that, if you can create a similar effect using styles instead of images, you can usually get easier compatibility, and faster load times. Not to mention that CSS is cached by browsers, offering previous visitors faster load times.
A Spoonful of Flash - Please don’t build your entire site out of Flash. And if you want to be different and build an entire Flash Site, at least include some sort of Preloader, and alternative content would be nice too. I’m not going to sit around an wait at a site, especially if I don’t even know how long it will take to load your Flash. Oh, and did I mention that I have an Ipod Touch now and when I’m browsing I get absolutely no Flash, nada! Your beautiful Flash site means nothing to my mobile browsing on my ITouch.
I have to say that I’ve never really put too much thought into page load times, especially with today’s widespread use of high speed internet connections. But now that more and more people are using Mobile Broadband and other services, load times are important again. Plus, not everyone has a high speed internet connection available, and even the office where I work has only a few channels available on our T1 resulting in about 200k of bandwidth on a good day. That’s quite a bit more than ye old 56k dial up connection, but still not quite “high speed”, and some of the latest and greatest websites and flashy web apps slow to a crawl on our connection.
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Tags: broadband, firebug, high speed internet, page load time, pingdom, Web Design, webceo, website load time
April 29th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Another trick is to play with the different options regarding caching your pages and blog posts. This can dramatically reduce page load times.
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May 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Great Tips. There are so many things that people use on their sites because they look cool and flashy but they do not realize that it slows down their site drastically. Nice Post.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:04 am
This is great advice. I pay a lot of attention to my load times. Very often I will put a new widget on my blog and not notice that it takes forever to load. I think that this really hurts a blog. Paying attention to load times is very important.
May 24th, 2008 at 4:02 am
This post needs to be read by every single webmaster on the planet!…lol. Seriously though, if more webmasters would take the time to “trim the fat” off there webpages, it would make a huge difference on how fast there pages load. Especially simple things like using external javascript files. Why isn’t something like that not used by everyone?
And also, as you mentioned, those people who build there entire website using flash. In most cases it makes no sense mainly because search engine spiders can’t read it (except for Google of course…)
June 6th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
I also use a few other tools to help optimize and diagnose bloated pages.
http://valet.seoconsultants.com/
I also recommend looking at various tools that will access your site from other physical locations and test the connection there. My websites target worldwide audiences and I use some of those tools to identify load times for visitors in various countries, I even changed web hosting providers once due to a bad connection to one region of the world.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Pingdom is great software, and you can download a free trial and test your site out. My blog is way too slow to load, but I think people expect blogs to be a little slower to load with all the stuff people have on them…at least that my excuse.
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July 12th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Alot of these resources that you and the other readers have spoken about are great for webmasters. For those who are looking for an internet based alternative one great page loader speed test is at tools.pingdom.com
July 18th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Great post on how to speed up website load. Not many people know that a great site is not all graphics or flash. If the site loads slow most people will just leave. The hosting provider usualy uses t1 lines so most hosts are fast but get slowed down when people have flash and graphics that take up alot of transfer.
Like post about flash websites being bad i think i have to link to it so some people can read that one.
August 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 am
Thanks for the tips - I have been trying to keep those load times down, and for the most part seem to be doing pretty well. For example, I have reduced file sizes of images by resizing/resampling, implemented a general policy of placing videos below the fold (keeping them off the home page), and reduced the number of posts displayed on the home page from 25 to 15. I am also trying to limit the sidebar widgets to a reasonable number.
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August 18th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
From an SEO perspective, cutting out the fat on your site is a huge plus. Load times are killer and reducing load time has been rumored to be factored into the Google algo for rankings.
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September 4th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
What is the maximum load time that you would recommend?
By the way, I think most visitors don’t like flash stuff anyway.
September 5th, 2008 at 10:19 am
4 seconds seems to be the magic number for load times. If your site doesn’t load for the visitor within 4 seconds, then they start losing interest.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I would also recommend this online free tool: http://Site-Perf.com/
It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart - so you can easily spot bottlenecks.
Also very useful thing is that this tool is able to verify network quality of your server (packet loss level and ping delays).
September 11th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Interesting looking site/tools there Zuborg, the network quality is an interesting stat that you don’t usually see. Are you using the Pingdom API for the reports?
September 18th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Of course no, all tools on site-perf.com are developed by my own from scratch
November 4th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Thanks for the tips and the tools…
I just hate websites that have flash on their homepage or as an intro. I tend to zap away rather than wait for the page to load.
Any idea on which hosting providers are the best as far as fast loading is concerned?
November 4th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
There are too many factors for me to recommend 1 host for every situation, but what it really comes down to is what type of web hosting (shared, vps, dedicated) and where the host is located in relation to your audience (US host with Asia visitors could be a problem).
I personally use Dreamhost’s shared hosting and have found it reasonably fast for an extemely low price. I also use a LiquidWeb VPS for mission critical sites and applications. I’ve also had good experiences with hostgator and InnoHosting.
There are a few other hosts that I use but I have found them to be nothing special, although not really horrible either (1&1, GoDaddy, 100Webspace).
November 4th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Thanks for that Jon. I use Hostgator but the free Web CEO tool gives my website a rating of 3 to 4 (Fair), yet using the above tools, my website loads within the 4 second mark. Not sure what this means and why the rating isn’t great.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Yea most shared hosts will get you a rating of around 4 because you’re dealing with the delays of 1 server running multiple sites simultaneously. For the most part you should be just fine as long as your site loads within the 4 second mark, and if your site starts to grow you can always move up to a better server to keep up with demand.
Heck, I know some ecommerce and other heavy traffic sites that are still able to run on shared/non-dedicated hosting because they’ve been heavily optimized (although with the cost of hosting these days it might be more effective just to upgrade the server).
November 5th, 2008 at 4:22 am
Oh well, at least I know it’s not my fault and there’s not much I can do about this…:)
November 5th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Yea, as long as your site loads within that 4 second window and you’re not experiencing any downtime (search engines hate unavailable sites) then you should be just fine.
The only other thing that you have to watch out for (and you’re probably ok if your site already loads within the 4 second mark) is having a site that is too large for the search engines to crawl/index/cache. Google for example will only cache the first 150kb of a site in its index (not AS important, but something to think about).
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:14 am
It is really advisable to avoid flash, cleaning up the coding also minimizes loading time.
December 11th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Great post I would also recommend a Firefox addon called lori or life of request info, tells you the time until first byte, time till completion and the size of the page so if you are trying to streamline your site this can tell you how you are doing.
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