Key point

Visitors to your website want information immediately. Don't make them wait.

Explanation

A fast-loading website is essential. Even though more and more people are switching to broadband there are still a lot of people, especially in rural New Zealand, who continue to use a dial-up internet connection.

For example, this page 'weighs in' at between 4KB and 26KB depending on whether you have been to other pages on this site previously. On an average dial-up connection it will take between 2 and 7 seconds to load which, painful though it is, is many times faster than most other sites.

Sadly, it is becoming common for many websites to impose waiting times of over a minute per page to users of dial-up modems. Not very clever.

What you can do

Take a look at the website analysis tool below. Test it with your website and with other websites you admire. See if you can find examples of websites that look great and perform well in the test.

WebSiteOptimization.com provide a great little utility where you can test how 'heavy' a page is and provides some useful tips for how to reduce its file size. Simply enter the address of a website in the field below and click the button to see a speed report: