Studies have shown that if a web site takes more than 8-10 seconds to load on a 56k modem then you risk losing the visitor. This means that the web page design needs to be less than 30 kilobytes in size. There are four main areas that need to be considered when building a web site:

‘Code’ size

Every web page design has a certain amount of back-end ‘code’. The volume of code produced, to make your web site work, significantly impacts on the loading time. However, there are a number of techniques you can employ to minimise the size of your code (such as CSS-based web site layouts and HTTP compression).

Images and ‘Image Size’

Images have a dramatic impact on the time a web page takes to load. Your use of images needs to be minimal. Images can be specifically optimised using specialist image manipulation and optimisation programs.

Total Number of Files

Every web page design has a number of ‘files’ associated with it. These files can be CSS files, JavaScript files or images. All these files need to be ‘retrieved’ before a page can be loaded. For each time a file is retrieved there is an additional ‘wait time’. To minimise this, files of the same type need to be combined where possible.
 

‘Page Render’ Speed / Feedback

‘Feedback’ basically means that the web page design will load incrementally so that the user can see parts of the web site as it loads. This is important for two reasons:

• If the user wants to navigate to a particular page on the site, they can click a link as soon as they see it without having to wait for the full page to completely load.

• The user can be drawn into the page straight away and start reading the content of the page, even before it has completely loaded all of its different elements.