What is load time and why you should pay attention Load
time can be loosely defined as the amount of time between when a user
requests to go to your site and when they actually see the content.
Slow
sites drive visitors away. It's that simple. 26% of online users rate
slow load times as the most frustrating factor in using the web. $4.35
billion in e-commerce sales have been lost each year due to user
frustration related to slow downloads. In fact 48% of users report that
they gave up trying to purchase an item online because the web pages
took too long to load. Generally 8 seconds is the maximum amount of time
that a web user will wait for a page to load. Consistently websites
with load times above this had higher bailout rates than those with
faster load times.
Know your audience There
are billions of internet users out there. Some have slow connections
and some have very fast connections. So how do you know which one you
are targetting? Look at your site, do you target younger families, or
sell technology products? If so, chances are your target audience has
high speed connections. On the other hand if you sell prescription
drugs, or glasses your target audience is probably older and most likely
has slower internet connections. For the technology site packing it
with graphics and a cool design will probably not deter sales. But doing
so on the prescription drug site may lead to many frustrated users who
leave the site before it ever fully loads. Always pick a design that
suits the lowest common denominator.
Reduce the Number of Images on Your Page(s) Take
a cold, objective look at your site. Try to view it through a visitor's
eyes. Which graphics are necessary and which are superfluous? Can you
manipulate the text with HTML (bold, italic, font face) as opposed to
using a text graphic? Can a clickable image be replaced with a text
link? Cutting expendable graphics can greatly speed page load time.
Assess each graphic one-by-one to determine if it should stay or go;
keep only those that are essential.
Reduce the Size of the Remaining Images Smaller
images load faster. After you've pared down your images to the
essentials, it's time to reduce the size (byte-wise) of what remains.
You can do this in two ways:
- Reduce image dimensions (Width x Height in pixels).
- "Optimize" the image.
Reducing the dimensions of an image isn't always a viable option. The
layout of your page may depend on a particular image being a specific
size (the way the page appears, though, is of course relative to screen
resolution). If you can safely shrink your image dimensions, do so, and
then optimize. If you cannot change the dimensions of the images,
optimize only. "Optimizing" an image means reducing the file size of the
image. This is accomplished primarily by removing extraneous colors
from the image. For example, a GIF saved at 256 colors can usually be
reduced to 128, 64, or 32 colors - sometimes even less - without
compromising image quality. This can *drastically* reduce the file size
of an image which, in turn, (often) shaves seconds off load time. Once
you've pruned the extra images and optimized the "keepers", upload your
lighter page.
Ways that Storesecured can help you reduce load times:
- Providing professionally designed templates with graphics that are already optimized and are selectable by connection speed
- Providing high speed reliable servers
Ways that you can reduce load times:
- Optimize your graphics using a image optimizer
- Know your target audience
- Use the correct image size
- Don't use to many external site references
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