I remember reading that the number one reason why people click out of the home page is because of slow download times. Could this be true. If so then I would like some figures for back up.

Thanks

D

It's very true. I know I leave slow pages all the time, and so does everyone I talk to. Depending on my mood and how much I feel I needd what the site may have, I'm gone pretty darn fast.

Most articles I've ever read say that you need to give the client at least something to look at within the first 10 to 15 seconds, even if the page needs to continue loading fort a bit longer.

In terms of hard numbers, I look to one of my client sites that has a pretty "fat" home page. It's really only 35kb TOTAL with all graphics included -- not all that much.

Nevertheless, the most common partial download on the whole site is the big graphic on the home page. Many people just won't wait and they click away --- and often not to another page in the site, but totally elsewhere.

Because of this, I'm a hawk on how pages load. I pre-load top of the page graphics and I try to make sure that all the elements up there are not nested in some complex table that keeps the browser thinking for too long.

quote:

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Originally posted by tedster:
Dustin,

...Nevertheless, the most common partial download on the whole site is the big graphic on the home page...

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How do you monitor partial downloads and do you know if WebTrends is able to do it?

It's been a while since I read this statistic but I remember that the average surfer views a website for 3 seconds before they decide weather to stay or not. And also the index page should load in about 6 secs on a 56.6 conection

Dont know if its still true but it was last year

Alex

Sorry I was away for a while and didn't answer your question.

The (Apache) server my site is on keeps an error log which not only records 404's but partial downloads and some other stuff. If your server records the data, I'm pretty sure Web Trends will dig it out for you.

Also another note ... you can get away with some pretty big file sizes for a page IF the top of the page renders quickly. Most visitors don't really care about how fast the entire document is complete, only how fast it's usable for them.

If you grab them with something good at the top of the page, they'll be involved with that, and they won't even realize that more goodies are still coming their way.

One way to do this is to put the top of the page (one screenful or so) in its own table, so the browser can render it quickly.

Another good technique is to use JavaScript to preload images at the very end of your HTML file, especially if it's a relatively small file-size page or a very interesting page that tends to hold people's attention for a while.

I usually try to preload top-of-the-page images for any key links a visitor might follow. That way the images are already in the cache and when the visitor follows the link, they have something to look at right away.

That said, having been on high-bandwidth for a while now, I have to say that I've visited a site or two that took a while to download over these huge pipes ... and hated it. So, while I am not necessarily stuck on the 10-seconds-or-less-no-matter-what idea, I have completely "rethunk" the idea that in some distant future when higher bandwidth is the norm, I can then load up pages to 350K.

And, that said, to answer the question, the lower the page size (assuming you are still providing what your audience wants), the better. Otherwise, methods of making the page appear to download faster are the way to go.

One comment on partial page downloads...just because you log shows them doesn't mean that visitor went elsewhere. They also could have clicked on one of your menu items and gone deeper into your site...especially if the menu loads quickly at the top of the page (I don't necessarily need your whole page to load to recognize that I want foo section of your site!) I wouldn't freak out about it unless the percentage of partials seems very high.