Need for speed: how slow loading stops users in their tracks

According to Meir Tsinman, president of TheMedicalSupplyDepot.com, each second of delay in page loading can lower conversion (the rate at which potential customers become actual customers) by 7. That means after five seconds, you could be losing every third person that clicks onto your site.It makes sense. Customers are busy people, and when they sense a delay before they even begin a transaction, why would they want to go ahead? Unfortunately, this backs web designers into a classic catch-22 situation, as customers also want to see dynamic sites with extensive functionality. How is a poor, beleaguered web designer supposed to win?Increasing your servers is one option, but not always the best one. According to Tsinman, improving his website’s loading times required an extensive, months-long process of recoding. He’ll be talking about his experiences (along with Darayush Mistry, Senior Director of Product Management at NetSuite) at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability 2011 Conference. The event takes place February 14-16, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida. 50 companies will be exhibiting at the conference, and 43 speakers, including Tsinman, will be discussing important issues from their area of expertise.Until then, though, we have some tips for improving download speeds on your site (summarized from Webcredible’s “Ten ways to speed up the download time of your web pages”go there for the complete list). Here are some we especially liked:

  • Use CSS instead of tables for layouts.

When reading through tables, browsers will actually read through them twice. The first time, the browser determines the structure, then it goes back to find the content. Because of this, the browser cannot display any part of the table before another, significantly slowing down your load speeds.

  • Always include a “/” at the end of directory links.

Without it, the server doesn’t know if you’re looking for a file or directory. It will figure it out eventually, but by that time your customers could have moved on to a competitor’s site.

  • Limit white space, line returns, and comment tags.

When each letter and space in your code takes up one byte, it’s especially important to make sure your code is lean and efficient.

  • Be careful with META tags and content.

META tags were once considered the key to search engine optimization, but abuse has lowered their efficiency. Keyword and description tags are still valuable, but limit yourself to under 200 characters for all tags. Anything longer carries two disadvantages: increased page size and dilution of your actual keywords.Good luck, and see you at IRWDU 2011!