How fast does your website load and how fast should it
be? People in the industry often talk
about the mythical “sub-second page load”, but how many websites actually
deliver sub-second response times and is it a realistic goal or expectation?
The most popular websites on the web today do load
quickly. For example, yahoo.com and
google.com which contain simple text and a few small images load on average in
1 second which is admirable. Amazon.com
which has dynamic content and numerous images weighs in at a hefty 5 seconds on
average. At the far end of the scale the
popular online auction house, eBay.com, can take even longer to load.
The Internet giants don’t meet the gold standard of page
load response times; therefore, should you be worried that your website doesn’t
load in less than 1 second. Yes and
no. The obvious bottom-line is to have
your web pages load as quickly as possible, while taking into account business
objectives for your website.
E-commerce websites, which have more images and use a
database back-end, will take longer to render a web page. For websites that contain pages with more
than 10 images shown on a web page, consider two suggestions:
First, host images on a separate web server than the main
web server. This allows a web page to
load quickly in the client’s browser. To
the user, the page will appear to load very quickly, even though the entire
page has not completely loaded all of the images.
Second, don’t run the database server for the website on the
same machine as the web server. When
push comes to shove for machine resources, both the web server and database
server will slug it out and slow all operations down.
For all websites, consider server side caching your best
friend. The .NET framework includes
useful built-in caching to conserve server resources and offers a considerable
boost in performance over standard ASP driven websites. Also recommended is Port 80 Software’s
httpZip which can handle web pages, regardless of how they are created whether
it is ASP, ASP.NET, php, or vanilla HTML.
In conclusion, set realistic goals for your website’s page
load times. Take into account all of the
pieces of software needed to create the pages on your website and constantly
work on different aspects to achieve performance gains.
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