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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman wrote:
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I was thinking more like 50KB or less. The current homepage weighs in at
44.2KB, of which 27.7KB of this is images. It’s pretty easy to keep small
images down to 1 or 2 KB each (or even less) if care is taken. Many of the
LUGNET toolbar icons are 0.2 to 0.5 KB.
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Excellent. I just did a homepage image count and found six, including the
BrickFest logo. If we were to have button links for a bunch of major sites, this
could get heavy fast. That’s why I aimed at 100KB - but the lower the better.
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So if it takes eleven seconds to load, they stay, and if it takes thirteen
seconds to load, they bolt?
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Well, it’s not a Law of Thermo, of course, but it’s a good rule of thumb. I
cannot find the reference in the book I thought I had found that in originally -
if I find it I’ll elaborate.
The general idea was that twelve seconds is about the max people these days are
willing to wait for a page to load. If it takes longer than that, they’re quite
likely to find another site to get their information.
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I think what actually matters is how quickly the first approximation to the
final rendered page appears. When the width and height attributes of all
the image tags are set properly, the body text of the page loads almost
immediately, followed by the images over the next few seconds (on a slow
connection). The difference between 4 seconds and 10 seconds is minor if you
immediately see content that you can begin reading and if it’s obvious that
the images will finish loading an a finite amount of time. That said, I
agree that faster is always better.
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And I agree with what you said there. Part of the waiting time too is your
server - a slow server will drive away potential visitors if nothing will.
However, with what you said in mind, we need to be careful that we don’t design
the majority of the layout around images. As an example, look at the homepage of
Plastikaa. It’s made up
entirely of images and Pictures Of Text, and compared with the LUGNET homepage
is frustrating to load, because all you see is image placeholders until
everything loads. I’m sure the owner of that site tried to optimize his images,
but if you have a very slow connection I imagine you wouldn’t want to surf that
site much more than you absolutely had to.
With that said, a lot of the positioning done with little spacer images on
that site could be done fairly accurately (perhaps even easily if the stylesheet
mentioned earlier is as good as it’s made out to be) using CSS.
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I don’t know what kind of traffic LUGNET gets,
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Currently about 70 GB/month.
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I know these numbers will be way off (ie higher than they should be), but at
least that’ll make it conservative.
First let’s assume that the homepage traffic accounts for, say...20% of the
traffic. That’s probably too high but it’ll work. (that’s about 14 million KB)
If we evenly divide that by 45KB (one homepage hit) that comes out to be about
311,100 visitors per month. Now, if we make the new homepage 100KB per hit,
we’re talking around 31GB of traffic just right there.
Perhaps I’ll agree with you and say that the new page should weigh in at 50KB or
less. :) Maybe 75KB if we need to stretch it (that’s about 23GB).
How far off are my numbers? Do you have an actual homepage hit count somewhere?
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Fast is good :) but there will always be text-only pages on the site that are
still faster.
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Of course, like the short threads. But what I’m saying is that even if the rest
of the site is slow(er) to load, a fast homepage will do its share to keep
visitors from being driven away by slow load times.
And if it’s just the homepage we’re revamping here, I think the load times for
the current other pages is just dandy. Doesn’t get much better than this.
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Interesting...I’ve never heard that. Is that information from a study of
end-users of a variety of different websites?
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I personally don’t know the answer to that, but as the man who taught it has
been in the graphic design business a while and has written at least one book on
the subject, I would say he probably knows what he’s talking about.
We all probably confirm this ourselves. When we visit a new website, typically
the first place we look is the left side or the masthead. The natural
left-to-right motion takes our eye then to the right side of the page, then
farther down.
-Mike
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