What is the top speed of your website?
February 18, 2008 – 11:26 pmOne of the important factors in any successful online business venture is how long it takes visitors to download pages from your website. Life runs fast, competition is tough, we need to treat our visitors time with respect.
If you don’t know how your site measures up against industry recommendations, make a point of going over to http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze and run the Free Website Performance and Web Page Speed Analysis Tool. According to McAfee SiteAdvisor, websiteoptimization.com is a green site - it is considered safe.
You will get a report showing the download time of various elements of your home page. You might even find out a few things about your site that you did not know. I did, and have done something about most of the problems. I discovered how many images there really are on this site! Every little graphic has to be downloaded separately. It is wise to keep them to a minimum - quantity and size.
I have dropped some stuff from the page to more than halve the load time. You may not notice at first, but 8 different objects have been removed from the home page. They all served some purpose but traffic data showed that they were not adding any value for visitors. So they went. More will follow.
I reduced the overall size of my home page files by 45%. In the report you will see this figure as TOTAL_SIZE. Images were a huge part of this. They were taking up a massive 61kb. Images on this site now only occupy 12kb. (kb = kilobyte = 1024 bytes)
Do you visitors a big favour and tune up your web site today.
Brendan.
