Customers Won't Wait for Slow-Loading Web Pages: How to Fix the Problem

As crazy as it may seem to you, there are still a considerable number of Internet users with only a dialup connection. If you are an Internet marketer, you most certainly don’t want to cut off a large quantity of possible clients just because they have slow connections. Therefore, you might want to learn to design your Internet pages and blogs so that they load rapidly even for your dialup visitors. Internet surfers are not known for their patience and so they will not be on your site very long if it is loading like a tortoise.

So you can understand what makes a page load slowly, examine a famous page that is obviously made to load rapidly. I’m referring to Google’s home page at google.com. Observe that it includes mostly white space with just one, fairly clean graphic, the Google logo. From time to time, this logo is modified with the addition of a single graphic. The only other important items on the page are the search box, two buttons and two, very uncomplicated menu bars.

An example of a slow-loading page would be a page that has multiple high resolution photos and/or graphics, videos and pop-ups like some of the car company advertising pages. While these impressive pages can be, no doubt, gorgeous, they load slowly even on a high-speed Internet connection. On dialup, they are simply not viewable unless you wish to leave them, go have dinner and come back later.

So, it appears your objective in designing your home (and other) pages on your website must be to reach a trade-off between function and beauty. No page looks very appealing without at least several graphics and photos but you must be cautious not to go wild. And, with what you do include in the end, you ought to do everything you are able to make sure load times are cut down to an absolute minimum. To do this, you will want image-editing software such as Photoshop. You will utilize this software to change the graphics and images on your site so that they load swiftly.

There is a lot that can be achieved in this regard, especially in the realms of file resolution and file type. You don’t need the resolution to be so coarse that it seems like an old-fashioned newspaper picture but you certainly know that it does not have to be of glossy magazine quality for it to look great on a web page. So, the rule here is to employ as low a resolution as workable just so long as it still looks agreeable. The more graphics and pictures and the larger the graphics and pictures are in size, the longer your overall page will take to load.

As for file types, some are more fast-loading than others due to the differing complexity of the way each type makes images. For instance, the GIF format eliminates all the color information not used in your image, providing you the smallest file size achievable. The trade-off here may be in image quality, so be wary. If you are utilizing Photoshop, you can work with a large number of files types. Some good ones to look at for web pages are the JPEG and PNG formats. Photoshop gives you the option to adjust the quality of your JPEG files. You will discover that, normally, a setting of 8 to10 will provide acceptably good results. If you decide to utilize the PNG format, you will acquire the best images in the smallest possible size.

Experiment to observe what provides you the best results for an individual picture in terms of picture quality and load time. Take time to optimize each image individually so that the total page will load as swiftly as possible while still looking great. Keep the amount of images and their sizes to a reasonable minimum while still ending up with a great looking (and functioning) web page.

Bob Gillespie

About the Author:

Bob Gillespie writes on many subjects including learning Photoshop. He is a full-time Internet marketer and author who lives on the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Learn more about learning Photoshop online at Bob's blog at:

http://learn-photoshop.inetwyoming.com

Other blogs of possible interest:

http://targeted-web-traffic.inetwyoming.com

and

http://internet-and-marketing.inetwyoming.com