Load Time

[Peter]

Hello All,

Thought I'd share this with you as I found it quite interesting - I was speaking with a colleage last night and the topic of website load time came up. He said that on dial up - if a site takes longer than 10 seconds to launch 70% of people will not wait to view the site. Although the move is on to broadband is well under way there are still millions on dial up. Has anyone heard of this claim before - if so and my colleague is correct then it adds credence to the service of 'Optomization'??

[lisastorey]

Hi Peter,

I am sure I have heard something along those lines .... although am useless at remembering facts and figures :cry:

Personally I am an impatient user so am more than likely to go somewhere else if the site take too long to load, I can only imagine other people doing the same

Lisa

[Alpha]

Peter

Personally I would go along with that statistic. The only way I would wait longer is if I knew the content of the site and wanted something from it.

[Webstuff]

typically you won't have a problem if you use a) mainly text navigation links b) mainly text page-content (don't make entire pages out of images!), and c) explicitly define image widths and heights, so the page doesn't do a strange dance as images load.

[microbe]

Every day people risk their lives to save ten seconds of travelling time. To expect the same person to wait very long for a web page to load is just not realistic.

This is a good page for reference http://www.benefit-from-it.com/index.php?fa=wdu101needSpeed.loadTime

In the past the rule of thumb was that a page should not total more than 30kb (html + images). This is probably still a good guide.

Modern pages are frequently quite heavy, but in additoin to the obvious things like carefully compressing images, there are a few things that you can do to help things along, for example, splitting very large tables and re-arranging the load order so that people can start reading while the page finishes loading.

[Webstuff]

Exactly; taking a bit longer to load is not a problem so long as theres something to look at. Make sure your navigation is accessible ASAP, and never preload too many images in the head of the page. Other than that, its really not a problem to have some bigger files, so long as the rest of the page doesn't have to wait. Personally, I've waited several minutes for pages to load on many occasions (OK, that was before broadband), but most people aren't as virtuos as me :P