Hi Guys,

It's been awhile since I've actually written out a tip as I'd covered most of the important stuff. Most of my posts lately have been how to fix x,y,z or make particular sites better. I spent some time thinking of what else I could write about, and here it is.

Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeed.

You want your site to load fast. If a prospective client visits your site and it takes 60 seconds to load, they're gone. You lost the client. Doesn't matter if you were #1 on Google, you lost them.

On top of that, SEARCH ENGINES actually care about load time too. They aren't going to rank a site that takes 60 seconds to load as they want their searchers to be happy with their results (happy searchers come back and have more chances to click on ads).

So what can you do you ask? How can you make your site faster?

#1 thing to slow down your site is going to be large images.
#2 thing to slow down your site could be external scripts you have (yes even like Google Analytics, so move those to the bottom of your page if you can).
#3 your host. A bad host could that over loads servers with sites can also cause pages to slow down. If you suspect your host, check it a few times throughout the day as servers can get bogged down for a short time.
#4 Pages with TONS of text could also slow things down.

So now for the fun part. Brian Doles (thanks for being the guinea pig) has created an awesome looking site (yes, created using our hosting service) at http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com . For 2 weeks of work I think his site looks fantastic. Lets put it to the test.

I found a great site you need to bookmark: http://tools.pingdom.com/
You can visit this site and type in your website address to get the results like we're going to now.

Entering http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com into their site it tells me that the total load time of the site is 9.7 seconds (I ran this 5 times while writing this, one time it gave me 30 seconds so if you get something strange, run it again).

The page lists how long in seconds it took each part of the page to load. In particular, first look at the main page itself which is listed as the domain name. It took just under 2 seconds for http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com to load which is the main body of the site. Once that has loaded the site would appear for people and the other images would then start popping up (on really old browsers nothing would show until everything was loaded).

Now there's another 7.7 seconds to account for. Slowly scroll down and look at the actual load time (in blue) and the file size of each file. And you will find one file: http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com/...pleanimgif.gif that is HUGE, 1.3 megs actually. It actually took 5 seconds to load this image (and the server has a very fast connection). If a dial up user was to load this page, it would take several minutes just to download this image. Note that several files are downloaded at once by your computer, that's why the time isn't the total of all files.

So, looking at Brian's actual site, we see the http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com/...pleanimgif.gif is actually the really cool animated gif he made (what program did you use, photoscape?). But since he included 210 images, the file is huge! Since most people aren't actually going to sit there and look through all 210 images, the solution is simple, cut that animated gif down to about 20 images (which will repeat forever anyways) and the entire sites speed will load about 5 seconds faster.

Other than that, all the files are small and load quickly.

My suggestion, make sure you main page loads in less than 2 seconds and that the total page is less than 10. Remember http://tools.pingdom.com/ has a fast connection. If you live in a rural area with lots of people on dial up, you can multiply that connection time by 10 to see how long they will be sitting on your site.

What's your total site load time? Post the site and time (average 2 or 3 tries).

Hey Gary,

 Very nice time! Actual load time seems to be around 3-4 on my DSL. This is actually helping me. I've seen a few things when looking at guys sites that I can tweak on the themes to make them load even faster.

Hi Daren,

More than likely a CSS issue on my end. I'll check it out. I ran your site and got 6.3 seconds, but I also see it's calling a few files (in red) that I ended up not using in the final theme. I'll clean it up and post back in a bit.

Updated and optimized the theme. Now it's about 4.7 seconds

I'll check the theme out, I might be linking to a few images that I've removed in the css that.

Very nice. I'm slowly going though all the templates and making improvements to make sure the are under 10 seconds. They should mostly fall around half that.

9.6 seconds for the Riversidehomeinspection.biz

6.7 seconds here.