Just How Good is Your Website -- Entry Page Load Speed

Just How Good is Your Website?
21 July 2001

Entry Page Load Speed

My standard on load speed is that the entry pages to your Website (the first pages people come to from an outside link) should load for a first-time visitor, using a dial-up connection, in ten seconds or less. Give yourself ten points if your site meets the standard. Make it zero if the site takes more than twenty seconds to load, at that point you've lost more than half of your potential visitors.

There is no single performance measurement that is more critical than entry-page load speed. The reason is simple. If folks won't wait for your site to load, it doesn't matter how good your site is. And, if they have to wait too long, they click off and go somewhere else.

Research into human tolerance for wait time in North America has established the ten-second standard pretty solidly. It holds up in all kinds of social and business situations. What about the dial-up connection part?

Even though you have heard a lot in recent months about high-bandwidth connection, such as cable modems and digital subscriber lines, (DSL), the fact is that only about 15% of the households who access the Net have the capability of a high-speed connection. Eighty-five percent use dial-up.

U. S. businesses are a little bit better. Even there, though, less than half are using high-speed connections.

Okay, what about the "first-time userä part? That's because people who are visiting your site for the second time or more have got some of the files stored away in what's called the browser cache. That's a little trick that browser designers use to get pages to load more quickly. The problem is you have to have visited the site at least once to have the files in the cache. First-time users haven't done that, so we use them as the standard.

It's also important to use those first-time visitors as a standard because the first-time visitors are the ones where the load speed perception counts the most. If folks have already visited your site and found that you deliver value, they're more likely to wait than if they are first-time visitors. Even so, if your pages meet the ten second standard for first time visitors, they'll work just fine for other visitors.

Let me throw in one more thing here, because it's related. The vast majority of connections on most e-commerce sites at night come through America Online. In addition to designing for good load speed on a dial-up connection, you should also design your site so that it works well with the America Online browser. It's not the most sophisticated thing around, but it is the most common.

The easiest way that I've found to measure site load speeds is to go to a site called "Web-Site Garage" that will do the job for me automatically. I've included a link to that site as well as others on my Resource Page.

Be careful of one thing here. The reading that you get from Web-Site Garage or other sites that performs a similar service is a calculated result. It's not based on actual loading. That means that it's the best possible speed. If your site loads Javascript that has lots of code or requires a special plug-in or anything else of that nature, it will slow down the speed below the reading you will get from a calculated source. If the Net is slow, loading will be below the calculated source.

Supplement your calculated measures using Website Garage or other system by actual live tests. Start from when you get the message that the site has been contacted and loading has started to the time when everything on the page has been loaded. Average several trials, clearing the cache after each.

Okay, how do you improve your performance on this one? The biggest offender on most Websites is fat graphics. One advantage of using Web-Site Garage to check out your site is that you will get a list of the big, fat graphics on your site, ranked from biggest and fattest downward. That will give you an idea on what to eliminate or slim down.

Another big culprit that slows sites down is stuff that winks and blinks, things like animations. They may have a place on your site, but they shouldn't be on an entry page.

Be ruthless here. Anything that slows your entry page down so that it loads in more than ten seconds for that first-time dial-up visitor, should be eliminated or trimmed until you get below the magic number.

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