Do you often click on a web page, see that it takes too long to load and you just skip it or close it down?
I do and I’m quite a patient person.
So how long is too long?
1 minute – definitely
20 seconds – yep
10 seconds – getting better
Your web pages have to load under 10 seconds, otherwise you could be losing a lot of potential visitors.
So how do you check and what can you do about it?
Using a free tool like Pingdom will tell you how long your site took to load and the potential bottlenecks that are slowing the loading time.
When I first tested the home page of this blog, it took just under 10 seconds. Using the results from Pingdom, it’s now just over 6 seconds – a 40% improvement.
And in my experience, by far the most common thing that slows down the loading of sites is ‘images’.
These days more and more people are adding images to their blog posts. But often the web owners don’t ‘optimize’ the images. They take the image or copy the image and load it and that’s it.
Those images you insert into your web pages can often be huge in size.
So my recommendation is always optimise your images.
For instance, by optimizing the images in this post, I reduce their size by 31% with minimal degradation (if any) in image quality.
Do that for all the images on your web pages and that can amount to some serious time saving when loading.
So how do you optimize your images?
Use a free tool called IrFanView (for Windows only).
Download and install.
Then simply open your image using IrFanView.
Then you have a number of simple and easy to use facilities to:
– Resize
– Crop
– Rotate
Plus lots of other facilities.
After changing the image as you wish, simply ‘save as’, select a JPG type file and slide the ‘save quality’ in the pop-up window to 85 or even 80. I’ve found using 80 makes little difference to the quality of the image but often reduces the size by 30%.
Click on ‘save’ and you’re done.
Then install the newly saved image rather than the original.
Do that to the images on your home page, go back to test on Pingdom and see what improvements you make.
As I say I made a 40% improvement just by optimising my images.
Let us know what improvements you experience.
According to Pingdom, my blogs average response time is 3,7 seconds. That’s probably okay.
But my response time screen within pingdom looks different from yours, I have more like a graph. Do you have a paid subscription, perhaps?
.-= Klaus @ TechPatio´s last blog ..3 Article Headline Techniques That Will Bring A Flood Of Traffic To Your Site =-.
Klaus,
3.7 secs is pretty good.
re: Pingdom – just the free service is what I use.
Andrew
great post especially about the size of images. It doesn’t take people long to leave if the page is taking forever to load
.-= David Stillwagon´s last blog ..Meniere’s Disease and alcohol =-.
David,
Did you test your site?
Andrew
Thanks for your submission to the Sixty Second edition of the Blog Carnival: Blogging. Your post has been accepted and its live:
http://thatsblog.com/blog-carnival-blogging/blog-carnival-blogging-sixty-second-edition
-ThatsBlog.com
.-= ThatsBlog.com´s last blog ..Blog Carnival: Blogging: Forty- Eighth Edition =-.
Images seem to be to high of a quality often, particularly for their sizes. By lowering the quality of the image so that it’s more on par with it’s pixel size, one can increase the pageload significantly.
Thank you for the link to check load time!! I have been trying to figure this out. I am impatient as well so I want to make sure my site is good to go!
All the best,
Lisa
Lisa,
I hope you make some improvements.
I’ve been doing some more speed improvements myself – I need to write a blog post about it!
Andrew
Hi Andrew
Thanks for the informative post. You know me and all things techie lol Love the fact you used slides so I can see what I should be looking for.
I am busy writing articles for directory submission for myself and some friends at the moment. Soon as I have completed those tasks will be back over to follow your instructions and make sure all is well with my loading times.
I need graphics on my site with each post and now my shope is up there are even more so this is right on topic for me. Thanks.
Patricia Perth Australia
Patricia
You are welcome and if you need any help…remember I am here!
Andrew