Conventional wisdom among Web designers tells us that we have eight seconds for our home page to load before visitors will click away. I searched for the seemingly obscure source of this "rule of thumb," and even Zona Research merely attributed it to "an oft-quoted standard" although very few people can remember where exactly they''d read or heard about it. The time it takes a page to load depends on three things: data, pipes, and processors. The data is the content of the page. Larger graphics and less well-compressed graphics will take longer to load. The size of the banner ad that''s served from your ad bureau must be taken into account, even though it loads from another computer. The pipes are the Internet connections: your Web server to the Internet, the browser''s computer to the Internet (technically there are no pipes to wireless devices, but let''s not get caught up in the semantics), and the connections between those two points. Is there any known network congestion that might require you to mirror your site on the opposite coast or somewhere else? Finally, the processors are the speed of your Web servers, your database servers, your personalization servers, and the speed of the browser-bearing device.
So then, how do you get your page to work within the eight-second limit, given that you can''t control all the factors that affect page-load time? You take reasonable steps.
Reduce Page Size
Studies have shown that text is really what people want on a Web site (please see How Web Visitors Read News Sites and What It Means to You). Give it to them. Use minimalist graphics. Rely on client caching (the fact that the browser keeps images in cache and will use those images if it recognizes that it already has them). Make use of tables to use the same images on every page so that the browser will use cached images. Only small parts of images that change should have to load on the next page. A good book on Web graphics design covers these techniques.
Flatten Non-Dynamic Pages into HTML
Most Web sites make use of some dynamic content -- content that''s generated by the server for that individual visitor. Dynamic content can range from the name changing in the personal greeting -- "Welcome Back, Alexis" -- to different offers being made to visitors based on their expressed interests or previous purchases. If your site doesn''t use dynamic content, yet uses scripts to generate the pages, then get your hands on software that will generate all the pages of the site every night (or early morning), and serve "hardcoded" HTML pages, rather than relying on the server to create every page every time it''s needed.
Cache Dynamic Pages
If your site does use dynamic content, then look into a dynamic page-caching system like that offered by Spidercache. Caching dynamic content is tricky because not all of the page can be cached (or else it wouldn''t really be dynamic, would it?). Spidercache is able to cache the parts of the page that don''t change. Your Web server can thus put its energy into creating the dynamic parts, freeing it up to serve more requests for pages simultaneously, and serve those more quickly.
One of Spidercache''s clients, Investment.com, had a site that took 30 seconds for a page to load. They were able to reduce the page-load time to less than 7 seconds. Spidercache was able to reduce the time it took the Web server to build the page to less than one second. The rest of the time was allowed for delivery to the browser. Spidercache runs on Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, and NT. The presence of server-caching software should be a competitive advantage for an ASP. Spidercache can help you not only serve pages faster, but also serve more customers. They''ve seen over 35-times performance gain in page creation, and up to five times the number of users.
If you want to see customers staying and shopping, as The Kinks said, "Give the People What They Want," and give it to them quickly!
Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. Her newest book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena will be out in December. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com
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