Entry Page Load Speed

This is the single most important performance dimension. It's worth a full twenty points.

This dimension is important because load speed determines whether or not people who are interested in your Web site stay around to find out if it's any good. Usability studies tell us that consumers generally don't wait for slow sites to load. Instead, they click off to something else.

Here's the standard. Your site should load in ten seconds or less for a first-time user, using a dial-up modem. Let's look at those three conditions.

The ten seconds or less standard is derived from usability studies and also from behavioral science research into how long North Americans will comfortably wait for something to happen. That something might be how long theyâll wait through silence in a conversation without saying something. It might be how long theyâll let a phone ring before they hang up. And, it might be how long theyâll wait for your Web site to load.

The first-time user part of the standard is important, because of the way browsers work. When you visit a Web site, your browser saves many of the files it needs to download in something called the browser cache. That way, when you re-visit the site, youâll be loading many of the files, including the big, fat graphics ones from your hard drive and not from the Net. That's a whole lot faster.

The final part of the standard has to do with the use of a dial-up connection. Despite all of the articles predicting rapid broadband adoption, only somewhere between 10 and 20% of U. S. households have anything faster than a simple dial-up connection. That gives you two choices. You can design your site to load fast for those folks and keep them on your site and happy, or you can design to satisfy your designers and techno-geeks and lose a significant portion of that 80 to 90% of possible visitors. The choice is yours.

While there are some ways to test this by calculation, the best way to actually test your load speed is by sitting down with a stopwatch and a clean browser on a dial-up connection and actually timing it. That's because several features that don't add to the size of the page actually can slow your site down. They include any plug-in and animations.

My rule is this: "If it moves, if it winks, if it blinks, if it generates the message "loadingä or if it splits the screen, it should not be on your entry page.%

You don't get any partial credit on this one. Give yourself twenty points if your site meets the standard. Otherwise, it's zero.

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