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MaintenanceQ17 "My site's visitors complain that pages take too long to download - how can I speed them up?"
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We can help you to adjust your site so that users spend the minimum of time waiting for pages to display. If you experience slow downloads, or suspect the site design is affecting display time, we can review your site to locate the problem. We can then suggest ways to speed up display time, and brief your designers appropriately. The time it takes for a page to display is often referred to as download time, but it makes more sense to consider display time. Perhaps surprisingly, the time it takes for a page to display is only partly related to the overall size of the page. Structuring pages for progressive display during download is often much more important than just trying to shrink them. Download time describes how long it takes for the entire web page and all of its display elements (such as graphics) to be sent to your computer so that your browser can display them. We use the term display time to mean the time at which something interesting or useful starts appearing in the browser, even if the whole page hasn't finished downloading. Common factors which affect download time are server speed, Internet connection quality, size of the web page and the graphics and other elements used on it. Total download time is independent of display time. You can have a page that may take a while to download but which starts displaying quickly. You can also have an optimised page which takes a long time to display. If you've optimised the graphics and know that the web server is performing properly, it's likely that the page layout itself is causing it to display slowly. For example, if the whole page is contained in a surrounding table, the whole page will have to be downloaded in many browsers before it can be displayed.
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