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www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/technology/article.php/518111
By Alexis Gutzman November 22, 2000 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 Flatten Non-Dynamic Pages into HTML Cache Dynamic Pages 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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