Does your
website take more than 20 or 30 seconds to download?
Then you lose customers. Lots of customers.
It's a well-known fact in marketing circles
that web surfers will not wait for slow pages
to download. They want instant gratification
and if they cannot get that from you and your
site, they will just click on to the next
site, giving your competitor the business.
Since you use computers to run your business,
you may be totally up-to-date with the newest
and latest modems and DSL lines. But most
internet users are not. Surprisingly most
users are still using slow dial-up accounts
and just because you see your page download
in 3 seconds, does not mean your potential
clients are seeing it that fast.
Your goal is to get your site (all pages if
possible) to download in the fastest and
smoothest way.
Get rid of bulky graphics. Use words and links in place of graphics
if possible.
Your logo and even your photo or a photo of
your staff is good to have on the page, but
they should not be so large that they slow
the page down.
Compress all photos. Small gif and jpg files
are the best. Bitmap and artwork files are
larger so try not to use them.
Get rid of all superfluous images. If you
accept credit cards, get rid of the photo
of their icons and just list the cards.
This will save space.
Get rid of that cute little "email us" logo
that is twirling at the bottom of the page.
It is most unprofessional and takes up too
much room.
I know of one site that has a photo for each
link on the navigation bar. What a waste. This
page takes forever to load just so the cute
images, which are nothing more than decoration,
can load along with the links to their pages.
If you have a list of items for sale, there is
no need to have a photo of each one on the
home page or any other page for that matter.
Just use words and links to convey the message.
Visitors may then click on the link and see one
or two photos of the item they are interested
in. Having photos of the item on the home page
with many other photos only does more harm
than good.
Use thumbnail photos when possible. If someone
wants to see a larger photo, they can just
click on the thumbnail. That saves a lot of
space more than half sometimes. That is why
thumbnail photos are such a common practice.
Get rid of images in the shared navigation
bars. Shared navigation bars allow the same
navigation areas (usually links to the rest
of the site) to be shown the same on every
page, but some pages will be slowed down
greatly depending on what else is on the page.
We could go on and on.
Look at your site now. What is slowing down
your pages? In most website creation tools
there is a place where you can see how many
seconds each page will take to download using
different methods from DSL lines down to old
14.4 modems. Test each page and see how long
it takes under each method. Use the 28.8 setting
and try to get each page loading under 30 seconds
with a 28.8 modem. See what happens.
Your goal is to get the pages to download
fast. In turn, keeping your visitors happy.
A happy visitor is a happy customer.
