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Your Site Should Be Speedy: Better Check It
Virtual molasses is even slower than molasses in the real world. On the Web, we expect instant information, instant utility, instant action—and nothing will send a visitor clicking away from your site faster than… slowness.
Strangely, many sites ignore the need for speed. We had a hair-raising reminder of this recently while reviewing a client's site in preparation for a major re-design. On the first page we tried to visit, 15 seconds elapsed before any content appeared, and by the time the page had fully materialized 45 seconds had gone by. This despite our high-speed DSL connection.
Other pages were even more excruciating. A key guide to this company's most popular products took—well, we don't know how long it took to load. We gave up after two and a half minutes. It's scary to contemplate how many potential customers must have done the same.
In order for users to feel that they are "moving freely through the information space," usability experts say, response time has to be one second or faster. A Web visitor will stay on track with his or her task only if a site supplies each successive batch of information in 10 seconds or less.
Bloated pages are a common cause of lethargy. Our client's pages were routinely 60 kilobytes in size or more, well above the recommended 15- to 25-KB "svelte belt." (The page you're looking at right now is 26 KB.) But in some cases—as we suspect was also true for our client—the trouble is in the delivery system. The server (the computer where the Web site is stored) may be sluggish, for example. Or the connection between the server and the Internet may develop a bottleneck.
You may not have official responsibility for the performance of your site. We presume that most readers of this article are Web editors, content creators, and other editorial types. Even so, we recommend that you check the site's speed regularly. Don't assume someone else has it covered. Our client's technical people had been aware of the problem for months, but somehow the plodding continued.
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| • | Time your site: See how long it takes a variety of pages to load. Compare these times with the 10-second limit and with the loading period of pages from other sites that you choose as "benchmarks": agile feather-weights such as Google and Yahoo, for example, as well as sites that compete directly with your own. Web Monkey, an online resource for site developers, outlines a simple yet effective do-it-yourself routine for making these measurements. |
| • | Simulate your users' setup: If a significant proportion of your site visitors get to the Internet through a dial-up connection—and roughly half of all home users still do—conduct your tests using the same sort of connection. (Adding insult to injury, our client's slow-motion site caters largely to dial-up users.) |
| • | Check the size of pages: The Firefox Web browser offers an easy way to do this: While viewing any page, go to the Tools menu and select Page Info. A little window opens up listing, among other characteristics, the page size in kilobytes. Here's where you can download this handy browser. Or you can try your luck with Internet Explorer. Sometimes it succeeds in reporting the page size under File/Properties. |
| • | Share the results: Show everybody your findings, including how your page load times stack up against the various benchmarks you established. Don't forget to present your data to the tech folks. |
| • | Sound the alarm: If the site is slow, scare your team (and your boss, if necessary) into action. You're losing more and more visitors with every passing second.
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