Tim Flight

Determining how fast a particular website or webpage loads can be a difficult task. Many factors come into play such as server load, network traffic, the visitor’s computer, the visitor’s internet connection, etc.

Assuming all of those factors are working as designed, how fast should a webpage load? A seven second rule has been cited many times, however I feel that is a little drastic. But due to the fact that people have wildly different internet connection speeds we really can’t talk about seconds anymore, we need to talk in bits and bytes of data.

Enter Web Page Analyzer. This tool will read any webpage and total up the size of the HTML code, linked CSS stylesheets, JavaScript code, and other multimedia files. The results will show you how big your total page is as well as how long it will take to load over different types of internet connections.

Lots of people are still using dial-up modem connections and chugging along at 56Kb/second. How fast does your site load at 56Kb/sec? My own belief is that pages should load in under 15 seconds for dial-up modem users.

At the bottom of the results page from the Web Page Analyzer you will see a section called Analysis and Recommendations. I tend to think they are a little harsh. My goal is to always have Congratulations, and Caution flags. Any Warning! flags I try to take care of.

My Website loads in about 12 seconds over a 56Kb/sec modem and has a few cautionary items. Originally the optimizer complained about the large CSS stylesheet. The stylesheet is very large on this site because all of the layout is controlled through CSS; there are no HTML tables on this site! I was able to compress the size of the CSS file by eliminating lots of whitespace in the code. It isn’t quite as readable now, but I was amazed how much smaller the file became.

Those types of modifications replicated through the entire CSS file made quite a difference. Consider doing the same through your HTML code. Since most of the HTML code for my sites is generated by a PHP script, eliminating forced line feeds (\n) and tabs (\t) compresses things in a hurry!

Even if your site feels like it is running fast, take it for a spin through the Optimizer. You might find a page like this one that takes waaaaay too long to load. Yep, four minutes and thirty-eight seconds over a 56Kb modem! Don’t let that be you! Also be sure to grab a copy of the book Speed Up Your Site: Website Optimization.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 8:58 am and is filed under Web Tools, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.