Have you ever found yourself

WAITING…

for your web page to load?

I can imagine some of you are nodding your head in response to my question.

Take a moment to check out this side-by-side comparison chart of some of the most popular sites on the Internet.  What you will see here is the file size for each site’s home page, the load time for a 56K modem (dial-up) and a 128K modem (DSL modem).  Take a look for yourself.

Why does this matter to you?

From the list of sites I used, can you pick out which one started out in obscurity and became a wildly successful business?

You got it!  Google.  The home page is a very simple page which Google used to develop their business model with.

The reason I wanted to use a variety of sites ranging from a search engine to a news site to an eCommerce site to my site is because of page load speed.  I believe strongly that a faster page load speed is crucial to the success of your site.

While the Internet is forever improving, there will always be a time lag between the second your visitor hit the “GO TO” button in their browser’s address bar and when the web page loads.  That time lag will take away a few seconds from your “sales pitch”.

You only have so much time to grab your visitor’s attention and convert them into repeat visitors which is one of the keys to customer loyalty.  Part of that time you have is your page load time.

Consider Your Home Page

More often than not, the home page is always the most important landing page which should capture the visitors and encourage them to stay a little while longer.

Once you have converted your visitor into a returning visitor, they will know that some pages on your site is bound to take longer than others.

For those of you who are interested in seeing the results for your own website, I highly recommend using the Web Page Analyzer which basically “calculate page size, composition, and download time” as stated on their website.

In fact, this is one of the few tools I use in my site checklist to ensure my clients are getting the best return for their money.

Editor’s Note:

This post was updated on 3/07/09 after revising my CSS files.  As a result of this, I managed to make my site faster than Google.  It is not always possible with every site but a good CSS editor will search for ways to help your site load faster.