How important is speed?

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Soldato
Joined
4 Oct 2003
Posts
7,444
Location
Sheffield, S.Yorks
If any of you venture over to the Mac area, you may know I'm mulling over ditching iWeb as the software for creating and maintaining my site. I like iWeb as it is very WYSIWYG, and I can make it look how I want. I've tried services like blogger, and I'm just not as happy with the results.

The problem is iWeb is the resulting site is a bit sluggish. When you load the page, it doesn't seem to be fetching any data down the connection, more pausing waiting for something to happen. Now my question is, how important is page loading speed for something of this nature? I mean, it's not a business tool etc, just a hobby. The problem is, when it comes to my hobbies, I tend to get a bit carried away with wanting it to be right :D

Am I getting carried away, and the site is fine as it is? Linkage in sig.

Cheers guys, thought I'd come in here as the Mac regulars must be getting sick of me ! ;)
 
Hm... I think the threshold was... 5 seconds before someone gets bored and loads another page? Something like that. Changed a little since tabbed browsing and things like the diig effect killing sites instantly, but still similar.
 
Shoseki said:
Hm... I think the threshold was... 5 seconds before someone gets bored and loads another page? Something like that. Changed a little since tabbed browsing and things like the diig effect killing sites instantly, but still similar.
Click to expand...

Have a click of my link, see what you reckon.
 
Generally, if I have to wait longer than 3 seconds, I go elsewhere... unless it's a site I already frequent.

Yours definitely takes too long. Even knowing it was going to be slow before I clicked on it, I couldn't be bothered to wait for it to load and closed the tab after 5 seconds. However, when I tried it again, it opened instantly.
 
That's one slow site, 8mbit here and it took 8.9 seconds to load (YSlow), there's 232kb of javascript which presumably you can't do anything about. But you're not helping it with the 334kb of images you're using.

  • Create proper thumbnails instead of using the full image resized in the HTML (well the inline styles)
  • Save your images better, your main apple image at the top of the page is 75kb on it's own, just copying into photoshop and saving out as a gif/jpg with default settings brings it down to ~10kb

Honestly though, even for the size of the page, it's still slow. I'd spend a bit of money on some hosting which has an easy wordpress installation or something, it might take you a bit more work, but you'll endup with a much nicer site.


Mick.
 
By the way, its quite a simple task to actually resize the images to the size set in the thumbnail... you are wasting bandwidth (however small) loading larger images and getting the browser to resize them...
 
WotDa said:
Yup.

My site used to be a slow dog when I had Wordpress and a 'few' plugins, it annoyed me greatly, isn't so slow now though.
Click to expand...

How did you speed it up?

Even moved to other hosting it's the same. Must be something to do with the way iWeb codes it.
 
Ol!ver said:
How did you speed it up?

Even moved to other hosting it's the same. Must be something to do with the way iWeb codes it.
Click to expand...

Stopped using Wordpress. :p

I swapped the domains around for a new project so just left Wordpress in a sub folder, doing nothing.

I may use it again, or I may just make myself a flash gallery with a small 'news' section. :o
 
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