Zoom, Zoom: Ensuring Your Web Site Downloads Like Quicksilver

by Joe Dysart

What's New

October 2006

While the web has come a long way since sites were too often slow-loading technological homages to their creators, the hard fact remains that most web sites are yet to be optimized for speed. The result - frustrated visitors and missed opportunities.

Joe Dysart

"It is astounding how negatively users react slow sites," says Jakob Nielsen, a principal in the Nielsen Norman Group, a web design consultancy. "If a site is slow, it communicates contempt for customers and their time. Users assume that additional pages will be slow as well, and that it will be painful to navigate the site."

Fortunately, a cottage industry of web site optimization firms has sprung up promising quicksilver downloads. Andrew B. King, author of "Speed Up Your Site" and founder of Web Site Optimization, LLC, is one of these accelerate-the-web evangelists.

His mantra: limit the size of each web page so that it takes no longer than 8.6 seconds to download. You can test how your site stacks up against that metric at King's free Web Page Analyzer tool. Simply punch in the URL of any page on your site, and the analyzer will diagnose the good, bad and ugly associated with your web presence - and, if need be, give you suggestions for faster download times.

King's top recommendations include:

Go For 'Skinny' Graphics: Big, bloated images are one of the primary reasons why so many web pages take so long to download. Verify with your web team that it's using .JPG-type images wherever possible. Too often, other file types simply add unnecessary bloat to your pages.

Minimize The Number Of Images On Each Page: Fewer images per page mean faster load times. Period.

Go Easy On Fancy Multimedia: Flash, JAVA and other effects are fun - unless you're a high school kid trying to cruise university sites with a 56K modem. Essentially, platforms like these can quickly transform user experience to something just short of a root canal.

Take A No Tolerance Policy On White Space: Even the most non-techie administrator can open Internet Explorer, click "View" and then "Source." While you don't need to understand the source code of the opened page you will be able to see if there's a lot of white space. Web designers often drop in such space to make it easier to read code, but unfortunately, lots of white space means slower download times. Eliminate it.

Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, California. Reach him on the web or by e-mail at joe@joedysart.com.