A website that is responsive and fast-loading makes the user feel empowered and in-control, whereas long page load times make readers impatient, frustrated and increasingly resistant to your brand or proposition.Web publishers tend to forget that beyond a five seconds wait an online reader will get impatient and after ten, he / she will likely decide to go somewhere else.These are the key reasons why any serious web publisher today should devote time and resources to check, verify, test and optimize the performance, speed and responsiveness of its online content, no matter what the format.

1. 0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response- that is, the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer.
2. One second keeps the user’s flow of thought seamless.
3. Ten seconds keeps the user’s attention.From one to ten seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but they can handle it.After ten seconds, they start thinking about other things, making it harder to get their brains back on track once the computer finally does respond.

Real world examples

• Amazon: 0.1 seconds of delay involving a loss of 1% of income
• Facebook: 0.5 seconds slower traffic causes a drop of 3% 1 seconds causes a drop of 6%
• Google Maps: reduced by 30% the size of your files and the number of requests increased by 30%.
• Yahoo!: 0.4 seconds of delay caused a fall between 5% and 9% of the traffic

Site speed is vital for effective SEO

Most of the people using google loves it because of its amazing speed. And, that is why, google has included “site speed” as one of the factors in computing the search engine rankings of the websites.

Internet users, all over the world, love websites with less loading time. And that is why google takes site speed into account in its search rankings. But do make sure that, it is not as important as “the relevance of your website” in computing its search engine ranking.

Factors affecting your website speed

While creating our websites, we are normally so much involved in its design and functioning that we don’t care about the factors, which affects its loading speed. The following are the factors, which affect the speed of your website:

• Use of graphics.
• Use of Flash and Java Script
• Excessive use of videos
• Multimedia presentation.
• Use of themes and skin
• Excessive code

In order to increase the loading speed of your website, it is very necessary to optimally utilize the above factors. But, the question is how can we calculate the loading speed of our website?

How to optimize your site?

Use YSlow by Yahoo. YSlow is a firebug plugin that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.