| When a visitor lands on your website
a bunch of stuff starts happening. Every picture, all text
content and all the elements of the page structure starts
downloading to the visitors computer so as to be seen. The
whole mess streams in chunks of code and as each finds it's
place in the page the page becomes viewable to the visitor.
| Q: |
How long should
it take before your webpage is viewable? |
| A: |
Instantly. |
This isn't as impossible as it sounds.
Here's the secret.
Keep your total webpage optimized to be under a
certain file size while still keeping your design ideas
intact as much as possible - but don't give your visitor
a perception that they're waiting for your webpage to download
for viewing.
All the effort that goes into controlling the file
size of the page is called 'optimizing' but this is a totally
different kind of optimizing than search engine optimization
(SEO) which deals specifically with designing your webpages
for search engines and not file size issues.
A few of the optimization methods used to accomplish
this range from stripping every bit of unnecessary code
from the page, using a specific table layout designed for
fast loading, editing images, slicing up big images into
a bunch of faster loading little ones and declaring dimensions
upfront.
Here's some ball park figures. Depending on modem
or access speed your results may vary. Most of the world
outside the USA are still surfing at 56k. a second. Internet
congestion can be very important also. Even small sites
can take a long time during peak internet usage like 8am
and noon when people at work start checking their email
messages.
For a really fast web page to load instantly in
a second or 2, total page file size should be 60k or smaller.
Web pages between 60k and 120k will take a couple
of seconds or more.
Web pages 130k to 200k in size will generally take
3 or 4 seconds.
OK, we just crossed the line. People don't like
to wait and become aware that they are waiting at around
3 seconds. At this juncture, if your webpage were any bigger,
over 200k, you're chancing that your visitor will leave
your site, especially if it's their first visit.
If your webpage is 200k - 500k it's slower loading
and you can be certain that some of your visitors have noticed
and are thinking about it, too.
Webpages over 500k are not recommended and pages
that get up to 700k or more shoud be split up into 2 or
3 smaller pages.
TIP:
Here's a fun tip. Ever wonder how to know the size
of a webpage? Here's how.
Make a folder on your computer's desktop and call it MyPage.
Surf the internet and find the webpage you want to know
about. At the top of your browser select FILE and then SAVE
AS and save the file to your desktop in the MyPage folder.
Look in the MyPage folder and see the webpage file
and a folder of every image used on that page.
From there, hover over the files and folders to
see their file sizes or change your file view to 'Details'
and you can list the images in their file size order.
Neat , huh?
The next part of 'What People Don't Like' deals
with website navigation issues. Click
Here to read Part 2 - Poor Navigation.
Part 1
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