Check the load time for your site

Patience is not a virtue on web pages. In fact, pages that load slowly drive visitors away, so test your site using free tools to find potential bottlenecks.

One frequently overlooked factor is that users have different ways to connect to the Internet, all of which have different speeds. If Internet connectivity is like the water supply, a T1 corporate connection is like a water main coming into the building, whereas dial-up can be like more like a shower with no pressure. Just because your connection is fast, don’t assume your visitors experience anything like the same speed.

Using tools such as WebSiteOptimization.com’s Analyzer, you can test your site for pages that are slow to load. This tool will examine a web page’s assets (HTML, CSS, image and media files) and provide a ‘Good vs. Bad’ summary together with recommendations for improving speed.

In the book we cover some of the most common causes of slow websites, together with tools to measure performance and find bottlenecks.

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