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Webpage Load Time
On the internet, there are two key things a webmaster must always keep in mind when designing a site: the visitor and the search engines.
If a webpage load time is too high the visitor has to wait too long for a page to download and if a webpage load time is too slow a search engine can not load a site properly. In both situations it does not matter how beautiful and informative the site is; it will not generate the business needed to survive.
According to two surveys conducted by Forrester Research and Gartner Group, ecommerce sites are losing $1.1 to $1.3 billion in revenue each year due to customer click-away caused by slow loading websites.
Does broadband not solve the problem?
While broadband access is gaining ground, at least half of all internet users still use dial-up connections. This means that the majority of a site's visitors will be downloading the pages at about 3-4 kilobytes per second.
For best spider results, keep the webpage load time below 12 seconds on a 56k modem. If a site does not start to load within 8 seconds a visitor will go to another website. This means that a page should not be any more than 30 kilobytes total including text, graphics, html, JavaScript, etc.
Website Load Time
The website load time can be affected by a number of factors including the size and complexity of the documents, the responsiveness and location of the site's servers, and the Internet connection speed of the site's typical users.
Particular types of sites will generally give a slow website load time more quickly than others; the sites whose pages feature mostly text content will load more quickly, while e-commerce sites or other sites with personalization options for surfers will take longer to load the images and other non-text content.
For shopping sites and other sites heavy on content, therefore, being categorized as slow alongside text-only sites is unavoidable.
JavaScript
Using external JavaScripts allows for faster page load time and faster parsing and more complete indexing of your Webpages.
Cascading Style Sheets
When you put all the font and color information as well as other design specs into a CSS file and call it from the page header, you have removed lots of junk that search engine crawlers must muddle through, plus you speed up load time for your users.
Load cramping
A big mistake that website developers and owners make is trying to put so many graphics on a site or page that the webpage load time is reduced to a spider; this is known as "load cramping". If a page does not start to load within 8 seconds, a prospective customer will go to another site that will load faster.
Logos, backgrounds and other images are great, but if they are causing your pages to load too slowly, they are doing you more harm than good. Quite honestly, your visitors do not care about your logo, graphics, backgrounds etc. They are there for one reason and one reason only....to see what you can offer them.
If you must use graphics keep their file size as small as possible by optimizing the graphics to the utmost extent possible and keeping the image size small.
Other factors that effect webpage load time
Other factors that cause a page to load slowly are:
- Slow client / server hardware
- Heavy network traffic
- Lots of animations
- Complicated preloading scripts
- Textual content that is more than one screen large
- Poorly designed banner ads
- Content that is directly linked to other slow loading sites
- Server processing overhead
- HTML errors and broken links
<< Dynamic Webpage
>> Webpage Redirect
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Aleksika.com is an online search engine marketing resource that turns you into a professional search engine optimization and
advertising expert.
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