Is It Time to Test Your Website?

This free tool can help you

In the world of digital evolution, you have to be at the top of your game to stand against the competition. The number of broadband internet users is constantly increasing. For businesses, the penetration of broadband usage is over 90%.

With this increase in usage comes the need to increase the quickness in which your website loads.

Imagine someone searches a term in Google and your website comes up on the first page. The user clicks on your site, but since it loads slowly, the user decides to click off your site and choose another one from the Google list.

You just lost a potential customer because of this.

Unfortunately that scenario is not uncommon. Today, when websites often have a lot of images, video content, or audio content, it’s easy for websites to load slowly if they are not optimized properly.

Two helpful pieces of information

One way to help your load time is to optimize your images. To do this you can use imaging software like Photoshop or Fireworks.

I personally use Fireworks to do this task. I take my image and then open up the Export Wizard, which is found under the File tab. After opening up the image in the Export Wizard, you can set it for the web, enhance the clarity of the image and save the image to put on your website.

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The other helpful tip involves a tool that will test your website and tell you how it’s loading.

The Pingdom Tool will test your full website page by loading the complete HTML page, including objects such as images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes. The tool then acts as a web browser would and loads the page.

The load time of all the objects tested will then be shown visually with time bars.

Each test will give you valuable information including statistics on the total load time of the page, the total number of objects tested and the size of the site including all of the objects.

The best part of this website is that you can do a test for free. There are more options on the site including paying ones, but you can do the general test to see how valuable the service will be to your needs.

These results will help in the way you go about fixing your website homepage design. If you notice your webpage designs are loading too slowly, and you offer a lot of visual content to your visitors, you may now be able to fix this problem.

Try optimizing your images first, and test again. If it is still loading slowly, and we define slowly at 6 seconds or above, then you may want to take some images off of your website. Be selective of course, we don’t want you to ruin the complete aesthetic of your site, but we also want it to be loading quickly and remaining competitive in your industry.

For more on website design and usability, join our Website Homepage Design Workshop with our own Nancy Horan on May 4th at 12:30 pm ET.

Comments
    Netcraftindia

    It’s a very informative blog regarding website. How should be a website, what is the basic things for the website. It also describes the value of load time.

    Reply

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