8 replies to this topic

[Photographa]

Designing a website that looks pretty is always important, but a website's load time is also a huge factor that will affect your visitors and your search engine standings.

 

I use Pingdom Tools to analyze bottlenecks in the sites I build to make sure that there's not one competent that's blocking others from loading. The load time that Pingdom Tools shows is unrealistic because they're using a very high-speed server connection, but it's useful for seeing where your server is struggling.

 

One way to get your pages to load faster is to load fewer components and keep the size of files small (loading fewer images and CSS files will help visitors load pages faster, and serving CSS inline will reduce the number of requests for more files on the server

 

Another thing you can do to speed up your pages is to offload images, javascript, and CSS onto a CDN - a CDN is a network of servers which will cache these files and serve them to our visitors from a server closest to the visitor. Not only is it faster for a visitor to load files from a server that's geographically closer to them, but this will also offload your main hosting server so you can handle more visitors more quickly.

[wasi90lk]

I agree with you 100%. Site loading speed is extremely important.

 

I normally avoid slow loading sites, I prefer websites that load very fast.

[Photographa]

I agree with you 100%. Site loading speed is extremely important.

 

I normally avoid slow loading sites, I prefer websites that load very fast.

 

I think that's especially true for forums or membership sites. If you want your visitors to stick around it's important to have their content loading quickly without any issues.

[milksheikh]

I agree, site speed and load time is extremely important. Site load time matters if someone goes to your site or not. Personally, if a site takes more then 10 seconds to load I will leave it.

 

Approximately a good site speed is 2.5-5 seconds time to load.

[Eclipse]

I also agree with your statement. Nice looking websites are great for viewers to view and it makes them interested in knowing more about the site. Though, loading speed for a website is critical. I've seen many websites which contain fancy add-ons, nice graphics, flashy icons, etc. They make the site look fantastic, but they do effect the loading speed of the site. With a slow loading speed, viewers won't be able to view what you have to show them

[Phos]

Page speed is huge for websites -- especially those looking to grow and maintain a large following. According to Google Developer's, "High performance web sites lead to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversions." This statement is true in every way. Having a speedy website keeps your visitors happy and they'll want to return. I'm a big advocate of tailoring a website to its audience, and one good rule of thumb for any audience: ease of use. Page speed is also factored into ease of use, because having a slow website means frustration with browsing.

 

Optimize, optimize, optimize. If your website is graphic-heavy and you don't want to ruin the aesthetics of it, optimize the images. Use Yahoo!'s smush.it tool, open up photoshop and downscale the resolution (but try to keep the integrity intact), and make use of CSS sprites. Don't have a site that looks fantastic but loads slowly. You'll end up losing those visitors after their first page load (or before).

 

There are plenty of free tools and plugins online that can help with page speed, so utilize them. If you can't yet afford to move away from shared hosting, opt for caching services such as Cloudflare's free program, or go for MaxCDN and spend an extra $5 a month having your images served across multiple servers world-wide.

[Collin]

Have you ever tried using a CDN like CloudFlare? I use it on almost every site, and I honestly don't see any "lag" on my websites. Generally it will be pretty fast, and have almost no down-time. I like how CloudFlare is free, and fairly easy to set up. Their slogan pretty much is "Give us 5 minutes and we'll supercharge your website". Cloudflare even has cool error screens, letting you and your visitors know what exactly the issue is, instead of saying something like "Error 503", or giving you a blank page with nothing on it at all. It explains exactly what happened, and can even provide an offline version when necessary. CloudFlare has great security as well. It has some interesting paid and free addons that you can use with your site as well.

[Sharon]

I wish professional websites utilized tools like this. Just the other day I was trying to research local doctors through the Blue Cross Blue Shield website and it took FOREVER to load.  The city website has its lag times as well.  You would think they would place importance on the load time of their website but it seems like only the commercial websites like social networks and such are the only ones focusing on this.  

 

Some people post different graphics like falling snowflakes and excessive animated images although these are fun I don't think it's appropriate for any website aiming at any crowd commercially/professionally. 

[asellus]

Last time I designed site (it was three months ago for aha-soft.com) I used there IconEditor for menu and set of adobe programs - we attained good picture quality and high speed of site loading, cos used novel format of images from aha-soft. They used system of image coding that decreased file size two- or threefold