Loading Speed of Web Pages
Just as important as the ‘Look and Feel’ of a website is the speed at which it loads into the viewer’s browser. A website might be well designed and easy on the eye, but if it takes an age to load that won’t matter. The potential viewer would have gone!
Unfortunately I find more and more websites taking an age to load. Some, like that of my ISP, I have to put up with to get to information I need. The home page is full of animated banners, flashing notices and everchanging graphics. Probably OK for the designer who undoubtedly has a high-speed cable connection and a cutting edge computer, but not so good for me.
Designing a page template.
Unless a website is to consist of only one page the first consideration will be designing a template. This is the framework around which all (or most) of the website pages will be built. It will usually have a graphic as the header and graphics can be very costly in loading time. Then there will usually be a sidebar for navigation, again possibly with graphics (navigation buttons). If these are rollover graphics (change colour or form when the mouse passes over) then this is also an extra load.
But the saving grace as far as templates are concerned is that browsers store graphics for a time. So once the first page has loaded, any graphics that are repeated on other pages such as headers and navigation buttons will load very quickly. Even so care must be taken with template graphics or the viewer may not even see your first page.
Unwise use of graphics is a major cause of slow loading but dealing with graphics will be left to a later date.
Above the fold
This is an old newspaper expression and is used to describe the first part of a webpage that the viewer sees without scrolling. This needs to spark the viewer’s interest and make her want to scroll down to see the rest of the page.
So the webpage above the fold needs to load quickly. Any large graphics should be placed below the fold so that they can be loading whilst the viewer is still above the fold.
Text is fast-loading, so there should be some interesting introductory text. It can be broken up with small graphics or Google Adsense ads if you use them.
Finally
It is difficult to check speed of loading on your own computer as browsers ‘cache’ pages for future reference. If you return to a page often it will seem to load very quickly. In fact it’s only displaying the page it has cached. This means that you may not be seeing the latest version of the page and need to refresh the page to see the current version.
Some browsers allow you to clear the cache, but in doing so you may lose pages you need. It’s your choice.