From Monday 27th July 2009 to Friday 31st July 2009 we ran an experiment on the website for our server monitoring service, Server Density. The aim was to reduce page load time by as much as possible with the minimal amount of work. With just a few tweaks to the site, we were able to reduce our load time by 52% — from 3.4s to 1.6s.
Now I know that most of you are thinking to yourselves right now, “a few seconds, big deal”. The truth is that it is a big deal. Say you are in a hurry and need to check out 20 some sites, if each page takes anywhere between 5 and 10 seconds to load up, that is a lot of time wasted waiting for a page to load before you can view it. Depending on your Internet connection of choice, this can be even longer.
One thing you can do to decrease your pages load time is by making the file sizes smaller. Certain programs can decompress your page for you cutting out white spaces and unessary comments or information that is not needed. Your page still contains everything on it that you intended, it’s just decompressed so that the browser window can open it faster.