Speed of your internet page (loading time)

my personal statement :

" If your visitor doesn't see anything of interest on your webpage in his first 3 seconds, he is already elsewhere "

what others say :

• Accelerate your web pages

  Web surfers hate to wait for slow loading web pages. If your web pages don't load fast enough, many web surfers will go away without taking a look at them.

  No matter how great your product is: if your website is not fast enough, web surfers won't see it. Fast loading web pages are crucial if you want to sell something on the Internet.

  There are several things you can do to speed up your site. Of course, you should make sure that your web host provides fast and reliable servers. In addition to hosting your website on a fast server, you can do the following to improve the loading time of your web pages:

  • 1. Reduce the number of graphics

    A large number of graphics on your web pages can considerably slow down your page. For each graphic on your web page, the web browser has to make another connection to your server.

    If you cannot reduce the number of graphics on your web page, then try to combine several graphics to a single bigger one. Use the same graphics on your other web pages so that web browsers can load the graphics from the browser cache.

  • 2. Specify the dimensions of your graphics

    Always make sure to include the height and width dimensions of your graphics in your HTML code. This means that every IMG tag should have the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes specified.

    If web browsers don't have to figure out the dimensions of your graphics, they can already display placeholders and start displaying the text of your web page before loading the graphics from the server.

  • 3. Make the top of your page interesting

    If a web page takes a long time to load, make sure that the top of the page contains something interesting because visitors will see that part first.

  • 4. Use CSS or divide your tables

    Web pages that use a single large layout table take a long time to render in web browsers. If you don't use CSS (cascading style sheets) to design your web page, break up huge tables into several smaller ones.

  • 5. Specify the dimensions of your tables

    If you specify the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for your tables, then web browsers don't have to load the complete table code to calculate the dimensions of the table.

  • 6. Double check cell widths

    Take a moment to check the individual widths of each table cell. If the total is more than the specified table width, then web browsers will have problems displaying your table.

    It's important to know the download times of your web pages. In general, your home page should load in 20 seconds on a dial-up connection and the top of your page should be displayed within 5-8 seconds.

    If your web pages are displayed and rendered as quickly as possible, people will have more time to read the actual content of your web pages and eventually they'll buy something on your page.

  Now that people can see your web page content, it's important to keep them on your site.

  Author : Axandra GmbH • Nordring 21 • 56424 Staudt

  IBP by Axandra GmbH • Nordring 21 • 56424 Staudt

  " I quote parts of their help manual here, so I mention them and give them a little pubblicity, also because I use their software daily and consider it a really nice tool "   Claudio Klemp (Mr.Quality)

  I want to add here (for our webdesigner audience):

  • Hops (Lag) and bad Html writing

    If your webdesigner refers to an image or whatever object as :

    <img src="http://www.mydomain.com/pictures/myimage.gif" bla.. bla.. bla.. />

    instead of :

    <img src="/pictures/myimage.gif" bla.. bla.. bla.. />

    then your visitor opens an additional channel on his browser for each such written object.

    Each channel your visitor opens means, that he will obtain a medium latency of 200 ms (microseconds) for each server between his computer and your server serving the image or object. So in case a tracert http://www.yourdomainname.com or traceroute http://www.yourdomainname.com results in 15 hops, the latency is equal to three seconds. Fortunately modern browsers open up to 8 channels the same moment, so you can devide the time lost by all objects in your page by 8.

  • Scripts

    Whenever possible place your javascript includes / loads on the bottom of the page, and in case you use Google Analytics right before those scripts as they append data to your page clientwise.

    This technique allows you to load first whatever previous objects and only thenafter activate the javascripts, which by the way usually are activated by your visitor. What is the meaning to load a program before having the interface displayed and being able to use it.

    Annother way of handling efficiently scripts is using ajax, thus loading on demand whatever is needed, and only when it is needed.

  • Images

    Images can be optimized for rendering and by the way, there are only 216 web-safe colors, meaning whatever else color specified is rendered differently between different browsers, not taking account that every monitor and computer will result in different colors of the same image.

    The best way I could experience is to transform the images into 256 indexed colors and save them as a jpeg file compressed at a ratio between 50 to 70%. The resulting quality is merely the same for human eyes, also because our view is pretty limited especially for the red color sector. A good program for that purpose is Ifran View (freeware), just google for it.

  • Compressed pages

    With modern browsers installed on nearly whatever client machine it becomes thinkable and even useful to serve compressed pages and content.

  • Statistics and scripts externally saved add ons

    Your server has all and more information you ever need, to give you useful statistics in it's log files, there is no need, if not for special projects to refer to external suppliers of statistical data such as google analytics or other providers.

    If your page serves the client an external script, your client needs to connect to the server which has to supply the requested script. If the server is heavy loaded or unavailable, or the hops latency too high, it occures often that your page hangs somewhere in the client browser.

    Please believe me, that it is possible to serve locally your chatline, there is no need to serve it from somewhere else, by the way there is lot's of fantastic and free chat software in the open sorce comunity.Even the clickofono can be locally installed and has not to be served by our servers. By the way , avoiding external providers, things become even cheaper for you, you just need to invest a bit of time to study how it works.

  • Speed and Servers

    Think about your audience, if you serve pages for people in " Madagascar " may be it could be a good idea to have your server in " Madagascar ", instead in a server beauty farm in " Holland " or " Alaska ".

  Now that people see your site, would be also a great idea they do find what they want.

  by Claudio Klemp, Dunia LLc

 

 

 

 

 

03-04-2010 Programmer's note and page audit report on behalf of Dunia LLc