I can’t believe that in this age of Twitter, 24-hour news cycles and always-on access, anyone needs to point out that slow web sites alienate customers, but just in case, there’s an interview at Royal Pingdom with Steve Souders, who works at Google on web site performance and is the creator of YSlow software, which measures web site performance. It’s a nice reminder that there are many links in the chain that create a user’s web experience, and it focuses on what developers and site designers can do to make pages load faster.
Yeah, that really is a no-brainer. For anyone that doesn’t already know Firebug is an incredible Firefox extension for optimizing load times. It will show (and graph) the load times of images, scripts, CSS and much more. Pretty invaluable for web developers.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
It’s typical of business or creative types to assume ‘broadband=fast load,’ and request or specify websites with hundreds of objects that pile on the request latency, complex scripts that increase render time, and enormous Flash files that download megabytes of data before becoming interactive.
This is typically the root cause of slow loading websites… a little time spent going over the numbers and the physical limitations of the Internet’s ability to transfer data (such as TCP/IP overhead for hundreds of tiny requests) usually solves it. No one wants a painfully slow site.
(By the way, I’m a ‘creative business’ type myself- I’ve just paid attention and learned from the tech folks who have been preaching this for years).