Speed up your site, dammit!
It's no secret that even the most laid-back of individual, when online, transforms into a demanding and impatient web surfer. Nothing aggravates them more than a slow or unresponsive web site. For example, a 30 second Flash intro can elicit the electronic equivalent to road rage. Unsurprisingly, the longer you make your visitor wait, the more likely that they will abandon your site, as this survey data from eMarketer attests to:
| Visitor Abandonment | |
|---|---|
| Page Load Time | Percent of Users Continuing to Wait |
| 10 seconds | 84% |
| 15 seconds | 51% |
| 20 seconds | 26% |
| 30 seconds | 5% |
Got a bloated website and want to know what to do about it? MarketingExperiments.com has 10 great tips to reduce download time. Their advice includes such gems as:
- define height and width attributes on all your images,
- streamline your HTML code with a tool like Dr. Watson,
- don't nest tables,
- employ CSS for layout (instead of tables!), and
- compress images with a tool like Image Compressor.
2 comments
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good article, but should of gave good examples of good image compression programs. I perfer ones from www.optimizehosting.com, xat.com, and netmechanic. all are good. Webmasters think just because they have a high speed connection every one else does also.
Comment by Roderick Coleman [Visitor]
· http://www.colemanbusiness.com —
10/17/05 @ 23:16
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compress images always to 80%?
Comment by Thinkbasic [Visitor]
· http://www.thinkbasic.com —
11/16/06 @ 16:23
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