Do you know how much a slow load time can hurt your page (and your wallet)? Overlooking the the speed of your website will a have very negative impact on your readership, and in turn, your profits. By keeping an eye on your website load times you can ensure that any potential readers will stay long enough to actually see your web page.

I just finished reading a very interesting post from a few years ago. It was written in late 1996, titled Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0. The post revolved around experiments Google did a few years prior, where a marketing survey revealed that users would prefer more search results per page. So Google, being the good company that they are, tried just that. They took a focus group and increased the search results to 30 instead of the usual 10. What they found was quite interesting.

They found that when they increased the results to 30, the total searches performed and revenue from searches dropped off by a whopping 20%!

But why so much? Well, it’s really quite simple. Marissa explained the the page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate whereas the page with 30 results took .9 seconds. That’s a half second difference. This means that a half second would cause a twenty percent drop in revenue for Google

If that’s what it would do for Google, imagine what it will do for your site. Still think you can overlook your website load times? Not a chance.

So, How Fast Does Your Website Load?

There are numerous free web tools available to test the speed of your website. Each has it’s own pros and cons, but all essentially do the same thing - they attempt to load your page and time the results. The only differences are in the presentation and a few extra bells and whistles.

Pingdom Tools

This is by far the best free load time tester.They test the time by loading the complete HTML page including all the objects found within (ie. all CSS, JS, images, Flash, and any iframes). It does this by imitating a normal browser and loading the page. They offer a visual report of the time taken by each individual object from the page, through the use of a simple bar graph.

Every test report also lists the general statistics about the page including the total number of objects, total load time, total size, and number of external objects. Here is a sample report (for insideWebmaster.com):

Try it out at Pingdom Tools - Full page test or take a look at how insideWebmaster fared.

Web Page Analyzer

Another excellent tool available from the guys at Website Optimization is the Web Page Analyzer. It is basically the same as the Pingdom tester, they both test object download times, the main difference is in the layout. This tester has stuck with html tables rather than the fancy graphics used by Pingdom.

One large advantage this tool has over its competitor are the recommendations offered at the end of the report. Using their own guidelines and trends, the report offers some tips on how to trim down the size of your website, in order to gain better load times. Here is a sample report (again, for insideWebmaster):

You can try this out at Web Page Analyzer.

How Can I Lower My Website Load Times?

So, you’ve determined that your site loads slowly and you want to know what you can do about it. If you’re like me, and you use a shared web hosting service (and don’t want to change), then you probably don’t have any access to the server. But don’t worry, there are still many things we can do to optimize our website loading times. We just need to focus on how our website loads instead. Let’s begin.

Keep Your JavaScript And CSS In Their Own Files. There are many great reasons for why you should keep your style and content separate, but here’s a great one. If your style is defined within your content, then every time you update your blog, all of your style will be downloaded as well. However, if instead you keep your style contained in a separate CSS file, then a regular reader would have no need to download this alongside your newest blog posting. They would already have this information cached in their system. The same goes for your javascript files. By keeping them separate, visitors will have them cached for future use.

Fewer, More Optimized Images. Count your images. How many are there? Now ask yourself if you REALLY need each and every one. By cutting down on your total number of images, you can save a lot of waste. Additionally, if you are still creating your image files with MSPaint, then it may be time for an upgrade. Most high-end graphics editing platforms have special algorithms designed for saving images which will be used on web pages. When I first began developing websites, I had never heard of this feature. Through the “Save For Web & Devices” (check under the “File” menu) functionality in Photoshop, I was able to cut down the size of my photos by HALF. Seriously.

Don’t Rely On Other Websites. Disqus, I’m looking at you. While it may seem nice to outsource your comments, or to host images on another server, this also means that you now depend on them. Instead of just one server to worry about, you now have 2, 3, or 4. If their servers are acting sluggish, then you’ll feel the effects too. Or worse, If any of them go down, then you’re left with missing images, or a layout that doesn’t quite look right, or maybe even no comments at all.

Easy On The Flash. Flash may look nice, but that look comes at a serious price. I don’t like looking at loading bars, especially when they last more than 3 or 4 seconds. If your flash doesn’t load in fewer than four seconds (or if you don’t offer a non-flash alternative), then you benefit by looking into some alternatives.

Kick Those Errors. Any errors a browser encounters will drastically increase the amount of time a chunk of code takes to execute, and can potentially leave nasty looking error messages lying around your site. Any time the server spends in error processing is time it’s not spending rendering your page.

Server-Side Page Caching. The idea behind this is to cache a page on the server rather than on the browser. This allows your server to save the web page in its memory so that it won’t have to access the disk as much in order to show the page (thus saving time). For instance, say your website shows a number of popular tags which may take multiple SQL queries in order to build, if you have a spike in traffic this will potentially create huge strain on the processor, which causes the access times to increase. By creating a cached (or static) HTML page, which only updates every so often, then that resource strain will be created far less often. This may just be enough to allow your server to remain active during heavy use times, and best of all, it will increase download times dramatically.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that insideWebmaster isn’t exactly the quickest loading page either (~7 seconds). And yes, I’ll admit, I’m guilty of using too many images on top of slightly extravegant javascript/AJAX code. In the end it’s ultimately a trade off. If you think you’ll lose more readers than you could bring in by changing your website, then don’t do it. If you have quality content to offer, people will wait for it. And I hope that I have content people are willing to wait 7 seconds for…