Just a quick poll to see what everybody feels is an acceptable time to wait for an average site to load. Feel free to comment as well as vote. Also, keep in mind that a lot of the world is still on dial-up connections.

NOTE: I'm talking about an average business / ecommerce site (such as hosting), so do not include sites that you know are extremely heavy or light. Examples: graphic intense (gaming, porn, etc.) or sites that are mostly text (news, blog, etc.).

An average business / ecommerce site (such as hosting).....what do YOU consider acceptable?

EDIT: My vote is 30 seconds (or less - of course).

Think for a hosting company its really important for
me that the loading time is fast (15sec) it says abit
about their hosting and the company.

i woulden sign up at a host that had a really slow loading frontpage, makes you think that something is wrong..

Originally posted by e-zone
Think for a hosting company its really important for
me that the loading time is fast (15sec) it says abit
about their hosting and the company.

i woulden sign up at a host that had a really slow loading frontpage, makes you think that something is wrong..

I think 15 seconds is way too long for a hosting company's home page to load. Amazon.com's policy is that all pages should load within 2 seconds (assuming the bottleneck is not at the customer's end). I'd say 2 seconds is a reasonable limit for most web pages. The pages on this forum take less than 2 seconds to load.

Your hosting company page is a guage for your customers to see how long sites hosted if it takes 15 seconds to load, a lot of customers will be off looking at a competitor's site before yours could have finished loading.

Btw, I didn't vote in the poll because you didn't have a "these are all an order of magnitude too slow" as an option.

Jason

When I was in college we spent a whole 3, 2 hour lessons discussing acceptable loading times, at the end, we read an official article that said 8 seconds at 128k

I personally don't mind waiting, because I use tabbed browsing when I load a site I forget about it for a few mins, then go back to it, usually loaded by then ;)

On Cable modem 15 secs is way more than enough time!!!!!!

On Dial up,60 secs might be acceptable............

The Dude

I have to agree with Socrat there. I consider it a job well done when I can get <10 sec. on 28.8. I'm probably doing just over that with my hosting spot, and with a 22 kb. home page load on my Web Dev site, I'm pretty sure I'm ok. I'm lucky most of my customers value function over glamour - lucky because the visual design department is where I'm most lacking ;)

Paul, to reduce image file size, first export using Image Ready or the Save for Web in Photoshop, this reduces the file size dramatically.

Next, use an optimizer (forgot the name I can find it for you if you want), to compress the image again without loss of quality. It can be quite effective, I haven't really done this before, just recently discovered this method (doing both compressions, not just one).

Originally posted by pmoduk2
Paul, to reduce image file size, first export using Image Ready or the Save for Web in Photoshop, this reduces the file size dramatically.

Next, use an optimizer (forgot the name I can find it for you if you want), to compress the image again without loss of quality. It can be quite effective, I haven't really done this before, just recently discovered this method (doing both compressions, not just one).
Oh, optimization I can do inside out! That's not the issue. The issue is making something worth optimizing in the first place. :) I'm ok with Photoshop and I know Fireworks inside out (ImageReady sux compared to Fireworks, IMEO), it's the eye for conceptual design I need to improve. I've always said if you taught one of these "kewl" designers how to actually develop properly for the Web, you'd have a killer professional on your hands...

I've always said if you taught one of these "kewl" designers how to actually develop properly for the Web, you'd have a killer professional on your hands...

I'm on my way :P

Originally posted by Socrat
I think 15 seconds is way too long for a hosting company's home page to load. Amazon.com's policy is that all pages should load within 2 seconds (assuming the bottleneck is not at the customer's end). I'd say 2 seconds is a reasonable limit for most web pages. The pages on this forum take less than 2 seconds to load.

Your hosting company page is a guage for your customers to see how long sites hosted if it takes 15 seconds to load, a lot of customers will be off looking at a competitor's site before yours could have finished loading.

Btw, I didn't vote in the poll because you didn't have a "these are all an order of magnitude too slow" as an option.

Jason

2 seconds? Give me a break.

First of all, I agree about long loading times, and have said many times before - the last impression you want your hosting site to have is slow. However, 2 seconds is simply not a realistic time on a dial-up connection for any site that contains much graphic design at all. Also, by load - I mean completely load. Done-Finish.

I can only assume you are not talking about dial-up connections.

EDIT - the site in your signature took much longer than 2 seconds, and hardly has any images. :stickout:

Originally posted by pmoduk2
I'm on my way :P
:smash:
pmoduk2

Hey, that's my line. :)

I have a dialup, but I don't wait more than 30 seconds for a site to load (most often)

Amazon doesn't even load in 2 seconds on my connection (700k)

Gen-T, to slow :D

Originally posted by Gen-T
2 seconds? Give me a break.

First of all, I agree about long loading times, and have said many times before - the last impression you want your hosting site to have is slow. However, 2 seconds is simply not a realistic time on a dial-up connection for any site that contains much graphic design at all. Also, by load - I mean completely load. Done-Finish.

I can only assume you are not talking about dial-up connections.



First, I said "assuming the bottleneck is not at the customer's end". In the case of dial-up, the bottleneck would be at the customer's end.

I'm talking about broadband, and assuming it's working properly. It would be stupid to blame the website owner for your poor connection.

I find that very few sites take over 2 seconds to download unless they are graphics heavy or on free or poor quality hosting.


Originally posted by Gen-T
EDIT - the site in your signature took much longer than 2 seconds, and hardly has any images. :stickout:

I can only hope you're on dial-up and not paying broadband prices for your access. For a test, I just cleared my browser cache, quit and restarted by browser, and timed my visit to ProfQuotes. It took 1.3 seconds from hitting enter to being completely loaded, and than includes the silly redirect I need to get rid of because it's killing my pagerank. When I go directly to home.php (after clearing the cache again), it's well under 1 second.

I would be very happy to have other people here with broadband connections test out the speed of my site.

BTW, the site is hosted with ICDSoft in their Hong Kong datacenter and I'm in Canada, about 10,000 miles away from the server.

Jason

Originally posted by pmoduk2
Amazon doesn't even load in 2 seconds on my connection (700k)

I tried it, it takes about 3.5 seconds. They told me their policy is it should always load in under 2 seconds as long as the client connection can handle it, and they have a lot of speed testing in their code to make sure their speeds don't drop.

The site is more bloated than it was a few years ago when I was involved with them, so it is possible they've given up on that.

Jason

From my original post which started the thread.....
Originally posted by Gen-T
Also, keep in mind that a lot of the world is still on dial-up connections.

From my second post (replying to your comment).....
Originally posted by Gen-T
I can only assume you are not talking about dial-up connections.

So yes of course I'm talking about dial-up, and taking that into consideration. I also wanted you to take that into consideration when voting in the poll, since the majority of the world does not have high speed access either due to cost or availability.

On dialup I think 30 - 40 seconds is a reasonable wait period. Anything after that you're pushing your luck ;)

Originally posted by Socrat
It would be stupid to blame the website owner for your poor connection.

You want to know what would really be stupid?

A designer or developer who did not take into account the significant amount of people on dial-up connections. A designer or developer who got so accustomed to their own high speed access, that he/she forgot the rest of the world's population who doesn't have it, and did not design their sites to perform well, and optimize their graphics for the fastest loading possible.

Originally posted by pmoduk2
On dialup I think 30 - 40 seconds is a reasonable wait period. Anything after that you're pushing your luck ;)
I agree. That's about how long I will wait before getting turned off to a site.

On my own sites, my goal is 30 seconds or less. I know that if my average speed dial-up can load it within that time, then everybody else should be covered. Even when my area gets high speed access, I will still test and design my sites with dial-up in mind, so I know my visitors are all satisfied (hopefully).

Originally posted by Gen-T
You want to know what would really be stupid?

A designer or developer who did not take into account the significant amount of people on dial-up connections. A designer or developer who got so accustomed to their own high speed access, that he/she forgot the rest of the world's population who doesn't have it, and did not design their sites to perform well, and optimize their graphics for the fastest loading possible.

You said my site took significantly longer than 2 seconds to load on your dial-up, but you didn't say if it was too long based on your standards.

The page is ~50k including a 3k image and text with efficiently hand-coded HTML. It should take about 10 seconds on a 56k modem.

I'd say it takes into account the needs of viewers on slower connections. 8% of my traffic comes from PDA/Phone browsers, and I get hits from over 60 countries.

I'm on dial-up and I generally don't wait more than 30 seconds. Broadband will be available in my area soon and that 2 seconds sounds great to me.

And pmoduk2 I sure would like to know the optimizer you are using?

handy

I prefer < 15 seconds.

Socrat, that last statement you quoted was not about you or your site.

It was just a general statement addressing the overall subject.

Peace. :peace:

I've been tempted to sign up for a dialup account just so I can confirm the speed of our site. Being on broadband creates this illusion sometimes of a slow site still being decent as far as load times.

And pmoduk2 I sure would like to know the optimizer you are using?

Advanced GIF Optimizer v3.1

Remember to use Adobe's Image Optimizer first.

Originally posted by GeorgeC
I've been tempted to sign up for a dialup account just so I can confirm the speed of our site. Being on broadband creates this illusion sometimes of a slow site still being decent as far as load times.
George, it might sound odd, but that's a wise thing to do IMHO. :)

EDIT: For the record, both the sites in your signature loaded fairly quickly on my dial-up connection, with the Dynamic Drive site taking a bit longer than the CSS site. Both were very acceptable.

Originally posted by GeorgeC
I've been tempted to sign up for a dialup account just so I can confirm the speed of our site. Being on broadband creates this illusion sometimes of a slow site still being decent as far as load times.
This might be of interest: http://www.xat.com/wo/index.html

But they've raised the price on it bigtime! Still, it's a handy tool, at least from what I've seen of it in the demo. Try downloading the trial. If it works well for you, it might end up costing less than purchasing dialup for a year.

But I've found that the best tool for roughly estimating download speeds is free and comes with every PC - the calculator :) It can't simulate high traffic or ISP overload, but you can't really account for that anyway.

Some ISPs and soon most offer some form of accelerator which compresses .gifs and .jpgs. Unless, of course, you've already optimized your images as pmoduk2 advises, then there's nowhere left to go so the compression algorithms pass the image through. I've been looking, but can't find my slipstream whitepaper.

The problems when talking about site loading time are threefold. (I was too confused to vote!)

:idea: How fast is the initial pageload, vs. subsequent?
Does the site re-use scripts, stylesheets and images, changing only the text within a template as opposed to the layout changing (like older sections of a site which haven't been updated to the new graphics).

:idea: Compressed or uncompressed?
Ideally, I want my site to be no faster when visited by an ISP customer who has slipstream (or some other accelerator) than a visitor whose ISP is behind the times. This requires that I compress my text - style sheets, scripts and html - after optimizing my images. More on that in a minute...

:idea: Latency.
How long does it take that page to start coming after I've requested it? You may have noticed I'm implementing a php-based wiki. Well, that is dynamically-generated static content. What I'll be doing in production, is setting up a 404 handler in a mirror directory. When a page is requested, the error handler generates it from the php backend if it doesn't exist. Subsequent requests for the page, until the next edit, are fast as blazes, and I don't need Zend. Additionally, I've decided to go with the .info TLD because lookups are just faster.

I've always preferred to target a specific size for the initial pageload, under 100KB has been my rule of thumb. My favorite analogy has always been backpacking. Ever gone on an overnighter with a hard-core backpacker? Me, I don't mind the exercise of hauling a luxury or two, but at the end of the day it's annoying not to be able to keep up with your partner because she's gone so far as to saw the handle off her toothbrush... When it comes to website design, I've always sawed off the handle, so to speak.

Talking about site load times is too subjective. I agree with PM about not minding a bit of a wait, but if that's what is in store for me every time I go to a new page within a site, I'm Audi5000. ( :gone: )

So make those subsequent pages pop right up, and all is forgiven. Now, what about compressing your text files? There is a feature available on Apache which enables GZIP compression of the outgoing stream. Apparently, the browsers that don't understand this are the older and less likely variety, I'm wondering what your experiences have been with enabling this feature?

I recommend this host:
www.icelab.net
And I recommend they get a faster website.

http://www.optiview.com/POV/task,ov4cooltools/parse.html

Here are their results for icelab.net:

Our analysis of the first 10 pages available on your Web site uncovered opportunities to conservatively reduce your page download time by an average of 95%, with some pages and images reduced up to 96%.

The following table shows the improvement in overall page download time your users will experience as a result of this optimization:

Page Download Times (seconds) ((56K modem)) www.icelab.net

Current Optimized Reduction
Homepage 128.1 sec. 29.5 sec. 77%
First 10 pages: 83.6 sec. 4.5 sec. 95%

Nice concise breakdown of overall site optimization.

http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/optimisation/basicoptimisation.html

Originally posted by Gen-T
George, it might sound odd, but that's a wise thing to do IMHO. :)

EDIT: For the record, both the sites in your signature loaded fairly quickly on my dial-up connection, with the Dynamic Drive site taking a bit longer than the CSS site. Both were very acceptable.

Thanks for the tests Gen-T! When NetZero was still free, I use to log in every once in a while just to do a quick test- it's a little difficult justifying signing up for a paid dialup to use it 2 or 3 comes a month, but then again...

Originally posted by pmoduk2
Paul, to reduce image file size, first export using Image Ready or the Save for Web in Photoshop, this reduces the file size dramatically.

Next, use an optimizer (forgot the name I can find it for you if you want), to compress the image again without loss of quality. It can be quite effective, I haven't really done this before, just recently discovered this method (doing both compressions, not just one).

My new graphics are finalized (reserving, of course, the right to totally change everything at any time) but not yet posted. I finished the image editing around 6am, it's 8:24pm now. I've been optimizing all day. I downloaded (and have since removed) a product called 'Web Graphics Optimizer Professional 4.2 Trial Edition'. My size comparisons include some changes in the images, so while one would tend to dismiss the comparison, the fact is that I was able to lose 1/3 the filesize while gaining image quality overall.

As I edit in Photoshop, I tried ImageReady first. It's integrated for a reason, I believe. Take some time getting to know it, but it's best to start with the editing phase in Photoshop to blur and add noise as I've previously described. Don't use the blur, noise or dithering features in IR for this.

A Photoshop refresher:
-The blur tool is in your toolbar, the same tile as smudge stick.
-Filter->Noise->Add Noise
-Vary level as you desire
-Set to 'Gaussian' and 'Monochromatic'

I saved my production .jpgs directly from .psd with IR. I used 'Save As' for the .gifs. Then, I re-opened the .gifs with IR and noticed something - my palette was not web-safe when I saved the composite images, although the colors I used in the individual layers were. I had also forgotten to interlace the logos, which I do by practice on larger .gifs, which made no difference in size either way. Changing to web-safe and then reducing to 8 colors bought me some significant gains on the .gif filesizes.

So, re-designing just a bit and optimizing led to an overall decrease in site graphics from 77KB to 54KB. Next, I opened all my optimized graphics in the aforementioned optimization software. The results were laughable, with the options worth considering yielding larger filesizes!

So, here's the result of optimization, round 1:

So, I was skeptical that ImageReady would do any better. Well, I was wrong! All the results were the same, with quality set anywhere between 20-100, both in terms of appearance and filesize, and matched the round 1 image - 15.5KB, which is pretty impressive.

Anything below 19 was again, laughably bad. But take a look at 19, weighing in at only 10.8KB!

I am really torn, and thinking of starting a poll!

Now the footer graphic. After round one: 12.7KB.

With no discernible quality difference, here it is below after round 2, at 7.9KB.

Site graphics, if I go with the dual-optimized, would be down from 54KB to 44KB. What's that, about a 20% decrease? Not bad! Worth considering despite the artifacting on the first image.

I did see something as a result of all the various efforts with my graphics. By going back in and using the blur tool, I was able to shave 2.5KB off the header image. A second optimization of this image yields nothing. 13KB.

Graphics down from 77KB to 46KB overall. :)

Well on my cable I'd say less than 15 seconds but way back when I had dialup I considered 30-45 seconds acceptable maybe more depending on the site.

More site optimization software:
www.w3compiler.com

Thanks for the additional links BB. Keep'em coming. :)

Here's a link you can make yourself:
<?
phpinfo();
?>

Save to your public html directory as something.php and point a browser at it. Great way to check if Zend is installed, but what you're looking for is "compress.zlib" under "Registered PHP Streams". This gzips everything Apache is serving up, the primary benefit being text files: scripts, stylesheets, etc.

There are also a couple of web accelerator appliances (http://www.redlinenetworks.com/p/tx2250) one can colo if one's budget allows. The linked device makes me drool, but I don't need it... yet...

Look at those specs! 300BTU/hr -- I could heat my office this winter! ;)

Originally posted by BigBison
Here's a link you can make yourself:
<?
phpinfo();
?>

Just make sure you delete the file or at least set it unreadable when you're done. There's a goldmine of information in there for hackers.

Jason

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/

I've just ordered my copy of this book from Amazon.

A designer or developer who did not take into account the significant amount of people on dial-up connections. A designer or developer who got so accustomed to their own high speed access, that he/she forgot the rest of the world's population who doesn't have it, and did not design their sites to perform well, and optimize their graphics for the fastest loading possible.

Well said! A tad harsh, but definitely has a lot of truth.

Originally posted by BigBison
[B]http://www.optiview.com/POV/task,ov4cooltools/parse.html


Wow, thanks for the nice link!

I AM surprised!

Just ran my web site on it and this was returned:

Homepage 22.5 sec.
First 10 pages: 4.6 sec.

I thought my home page would have taken less than 22.5 sec to download initially. I guess the rest of the pages benefitted from the fact that all images, and javascripts on the site are called by "absolute link" like "http://blah.com/blah/blah/blah.html" instead of "relative links" like "../blah.html"

I am not sure where I read it, but I started using it because browsers like it and cache it better. Obviously there are quite a few negative issues with this practice, but 4.6 sec is hard to beat for loading on a dial-up.... :cartman:

Originally posted by edwardcyh
Wow, thanks for the nice link!

I AM surprised!

Just ran my web site on it and this was returned:

Homepage 22.5 sec.
First 10 pages: 4.6 sec.

I thought my home page would have taken less than 22.5 sec to download initially. I guess the rest of the pages benefitted from the fact that all images, and javascripts on the site are called by "absolute link" like "http://blah.com/blah/blah/blah.html" instead of "relative links" like "../blah.html"

I am not sure where I read it, but I started using it because browsers like it and cache it better. Obviously there are quite a few negative issues with this practice, but 4.6 sec is hard to beat for loading on a dial-up.... :cartman:
Hmm, I've never heard that. Once something is called into cache, it's cached, at least that's what I was always told. If you can find that bit of info, I'd be very interested in reading it!

Absolute links should lengthen load times by a few microseconds, since they typically require a few bytes more. I just checked the speed of my home page on that one speed checker Eric posted earlier, and I loaded in 6.6 seconds at 14.4 speed.

I think I can live with that... :D

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/html/optimize/

Includes info about shortening URLs - i.e. changing example.com/something.php?action=x&etc... to just example.com/something