Web users consistently rate speed as one of their top priorities. Your site's
speed is becoming increasingly important as users are faced with a bewildering
range of sites to visit. For your site to be successful, you need to know how
fast your site should be, monitor your site's speed, and make the necessary
changes to keep your site competitive.
Setting Speed Goals
Some people argue that broadband connections are eliminating the need to obsess
about speed. However, statistics show that the percentage of users accessing the
Web with high-speed connections is actually decreasing! This is due primarily to
the number of people connecting with modems growing much faster than those
connecting at higher speeds. Research shows a direct relationship between a Web
site's speed and its profitability.
Setting your site's speed goals is more important now than ever. Ideally,
hypertext systems should take about 1/4 second to jump from one page to another.
Any faster, and people may not realize that the page changed. Any slower, and
the page load time becomes annoying.
Because of the current networks' limitations, business sites aren't going to get
close to this ideal page-load time in the near future. A more realistic goal for
general Web pages is around 3 seconds over a high-speed connection -- typical of
top business sites' high-level pages. Some consultants ascribe to the 8-second
rule. Ignore them! Your site must be faster than your competitors; faster
equals better to Web users.
A competitive analysis is the best way to set your speed goals. This involves
benchmarking your site against competitors and best-in-class sites in your
industry. Look at how long key tasks take to perform on your site versus
competitors, then benchmark your most important content and services and set
goals that will put your site ahead of your competition.
Measuring Site Speed
A key part of your site's success is getting speed measurements for your site.
You can use an outside service, such as Keynote, or your can purchase software,
such as SiteScope, and do it yourself.
Keynote and similar tools
monitor your URLs on a regular basis, measuring availability and speed.
Outsourcing this function offers several benefits: someone else does it; they
can monitor your site from points around the world; and they have industry
benchmarks for comparison.
You can also measure your site's speed with software such as
SiteScope. To do this,
you need a machine that can be loaded with the monitoring software, and it needs
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