Dear Willie-ga

We are having our web-site re-designed, and there is the usual
pressure from marketing and people who like pretty pictures to have a
very 'heavy' homepage.
Can you advise on what would be your suggested maximal page-size if we
want a fast-loading homepage?  I know that 'fast-loading' is a bit
subjective, but what's considered good practice in this area?

Hello again

There have been numerous surveys that show users are turned off by
sites that take too long to load. By far the biggest culprits are
sites that try to impress with graphics that look great, but are often
never seen as users have long since surfed onwards.

Page load time depends on
- The size of your HTML file and any frames it references. 
- The number and size of your images. ( and those of HEIGHT and WIDTH
attributes with your IMG and TABLE tags.)
- The number of servers that must be contacted to download files and
images.
- The speed of the user's modem. 

To answer your question, it's generally a good idea to keep your page
load times under about 12 seconds on a 28.8 modem. You can do this by

1 Limiting Number of Graphics 
The quicker your information is displayed, the better. Graphics can
improve the look and feel of your site, but too many can significantly
increase the time your site takes to load. Remember, content is your
focus, not graphics.

2 Optimising Graphics
To help keep load time to a minimum, ensure your graphics are
optimised. Your designer can help you with this but put simply, keep
the colours down, keep the size down, try to load images from the same
place, and remember to put the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags in your HTML. (
This means that it doesn't have to spend time on loading the
attributes of the image as it "knows" them already.) Always optimize
(crunch) the file size of any images you are using. There are several
graphics tools that can accomplish this for you (I use Paintshop Pro).

3 Keep it Technically Simple 
Try not to be seduced by flashy marketing ploys like animated
graphics. Not only are they subject to the vagaries of fashion, but
they can also significantly increase the load time and cause technical
problems if not used properly, and there is research to show that they
don't get noticed much more than ordinary graphics.

4 Be Aware of the Overall size of your pages. 
Ensure that it is kept well below 100K. Again, your designer can help
you with this, but basically, add up the size of the HTML file and the
size of all your images. All together, it should be less than 100K for
optimal use, and remember, less is better.

For example, my site at http://www.willie.meikle.btinternet.co.uk has
a lot of text and graphics, but because the graphics are small, and
kept simple, the total page size is only about 35K, and it fits the
criteria above, loading on a 28.8K modem in about 10 seconds.

If you have a high-speed Internet connection, dial in with a modem to
determine your page load time for dialup users. I think this is often
ignored - people design flashy sites on their own high-speed systems
and assume everybody else sees them load at that speed, forgetting
about dial-up users.

Basically, its a trade off between what you want, and how fast you can
get it to load. If you can tell everything effectively in ten lines of
text it'll load in a flash and do the job perfectly. Someone I know
has a page with one small graphic that says "Mail me for free stuff."
- it's less than 5K in size, loads in a second, and gets him plenty of
business.

Hope that helps, but as usual, if you need clarification, just ask.

Willie-ga


There's a really neat site at Net Mechanic
( http://www.netmechanic.com/toolbox/html-code.htm )
It allows you a free test of your web page to give load times on
different modems, and gives free, detailed reports on how to improve
load efficiency.

There's a nice discussion on user perception of load time here:
Design your page for Load Speed, By Virtual Mechanics
http://developers.evrsoft.com/articles/design_your_page_for_load_speed.shtml

Even more than I asked for.  Wonderful!