As a web designer or web developer how much thought do you give to page load speed? Waiting for a web page to load online is equivalent to the real world experience of waiting in a queue. Except online you can opt-out and go somewhere else incredibly easily.
The impact of a slow website on visitor experience and on the efficiency of a website as a business, sales, and communication tool are significant. Whether people coming to one of your websites are visiting for information, a product, to collaborate as part of a social network, make a booking, or carry out a transaction, the faster they can do it the happier and more productive they will be and the more likely they are to return. Ensuring faster page loads provides incredible value to a clients business and website goals allowing visitors to simply achieve their goals faster and reducing task abandonment rates.
Fast is better than slow
Forrester Research and Gartner Group report that ecommerce sites in the US alone are losing $1.1. to $1.3 billion in revenue annually to customer click-away caused by slow-loading websites. Conversely, when Shopzilla increased the speed of their website by 5 seconds it resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 10% increase in revenue, a 50% reduction in hardware, and a 120% increase traffic from Google.
‘Fast is better than slow’ is even engrained in the Google Philosophy ‘Ten things Google has found to be true’ where it states that one of its ten corporate goals is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible. In 2008 Google reinforced this when they added landing page load time as a component of Google Adwords Quality Score thereby rewarding fast page load time.
Why fast is better than slow
In a nutshell a faster website allows visitors to do more, view more, buy more. Visitors can:
• Complete tasks faster whether that’s ordering a passport or buying a coffee maker. People on the web are task focused. They aren’t there to hang around and the quicker they can achieve their goals, the more likely they are to feel good about their visit and come back. This productivity benefit is emerging as key – just being able to do more faster offers huge savings for business whether its via their intranet environment (increase in staff productivity) or external website.
• View more pages and complete more actions more comfortably (advertisers particularly like this benefit as their advertising gets more eyeballs and potential clicks).
• Get speed. Today is the attention deficit age, people want things fast and if it takes time they’ll just go elsewhere.
• Reduce data-traffic costs. Reducing the number of server requests reduces the amount of energy and space your server uses. Believe me this save high traffic websites a lot of money.
So what effects website speed?
There are three things. First, the speed at which the web server process the page; secondly, the broadband (or dial-up) connection speed of the browser; and thirdly, the distance from the customer to the web server.
Recent advances in hardware mean servers process pages almost instantly and 1MB broadband or greater is available in most countries. The one thing that hasn’t changed is distance. New York to London is still 5580km and Hong Kong to Los Angeles 7100km. Because web page load times increase proportionately to the distance between browser and server you may be surprised to discover that the speed of your website as experienced by you in London, for example, will not be the same as experienced by your customers in Sydney or Delhi.
In fact the pages on your website may so slow to load that your customers may be abandoning your website. Recent research by Jupiter Research into web browsing habits shows that web pages taking more than four seconds to load experience a 33% drop-off rate. Modern web pages, rich with content, often have more than 50 images, scripts, styles and HTML frames.
Each one requires a separate trip from browser to server and, even though data travels at the speed of light, the cumulative effect of these trips means slower web pages. In many instances significantly slower web pages. In shopping terms, it’s a bit like making individual trips to and from the supermarket for every grocery item. You’ll get there in the end, but it’ll certainly put you off shopping.
What you can do today
For today’s websites, typically 80 percent to 90 percent of the load time is client-based — the time it takes to load every JavaScript file, stylesheet and image.
How to improve client performance:
• Follow the rules. Steve Souders (Google Web performance engineer) published 14 rules for speeding up websites with client optimizations from his work at Google and Yahoo. You can implement these by cutting code, or automatically with a website accelerator – a tool that dynamically applies client optimizations.
• Avoid flash or Silverlight on the homepage. Yes they look cool, but those nifty flash controls take a long time to download from around the world. People spend more time watching them download than using them.
• Limit external content. Each YouTube video, advertisement and image your Web page displays from another site takes exponentially longer for browsers to download – since they have to open a new connection to the external site, and now you’re dependent on their performance.
• Host close to your market. Because Web pages load quicker over shorter distances, choose a hosting location close to your target market.
• You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so….you’ve got measure! Find out how fast the website, or at the very least its high traffic pages, load for visitors around the world, particularly in countries where you/your customers get a lot of traffic from and most importantly where you get the most business and sales from.
Conclusion
A fast website can bring huge benefits to a business or organisation and hopefully you can see how do-able that is whether your optimize ‘by hand’ or zip on a piece of software that will do it for you automatically. Start off with finding out the speed of your website, take action to improve that speed and accelerate your web performance – measure the difference in the performance of your website, look for a raise 
Ed Robinson, CEO, Aptimize. Specialist in increasing website performance , and SharePoint performance issues.
