Greg Bell

Many of today's Web pages take too long for users to download. We've all landed on a page, stared impatiently at a blank screen for a minute or two, and become so frustrated that we found another activity to occupy our time. After responding to the 25 e-mails left minimized on the desktop, we check the page again only to experience a very large image struggling to open before a page times out. We all know there's a correlation between page load time and page size: an increase in page size means an increase in page load time. Unfortunately, users don't increase the time they spend waiting on your site. Several studies show that most users won't wait longer than 20 seconds for a page to load before leaving the site. Keep the page size less than 50KB in order to keep a use... (more)