Consider Page Load Speed

ccording to WebsiteOptimization, 78.45% of all home internet users in the US were on broadband connections as of the end of 2006. However, this still leaves 21.55% of internet users on narrowband connections at 56K and lower. This means that considering the page load speed of your landing page should be of importance to you. Otherwise, many of the users with slower connections will naturally have a higher likelihood of abandoning your site. What are some things that you can do to make your landing page load faster?

1. As mentioned in my previous article Keep Users Engaged, don’t drown your page with too many graphical elements. Not only will this intimidate the user, but will lengthen your landing page load times and cause a higher rate of abandonment.

2. Avoid using too many animations. Animations take up a huge amount of space since they are comprised of multiple frames of static images. A blinking arrow animation with 8 frames can take up to 30-40K.

3. Compress your images as much as possible. I don’t mean that you should compress them to the point where they appear grainy like the EGA graphics from Space Quest, but don’t use the best image quality possible either. Determine the appropriate compression level where the quality reduction is barely noticeable.

4. Minimize dependencies on other pages. If you are calling images or code from other servers (such as tracking pixels), make sure that you thoroughly test connection reliability. Performance issues from remote servers can wreak havoc on your page load speeds by creating severe bottlenecks.

There are many other ways to speed up your webpage, but the important idea that I wanted to convey in this article was the principle itself. Should you want to determine the load speed of your landing page on different connection types, you can use the Web Page Analyzer provided by WebsiteOptimization.

Source on this link: http://www.cdfnetworks.com/landing-page-or-redirect-that-is-the-question/