In this blog we talk about making our reader’s experience more comfortable. And the single biggest factor is this: making your website load faster on your reader’s browser.

There is a cool website Numion.com where you can check how much time it takes for websites to load completely on your browser. I googled some more stopwatches but this is to my knowledge the easiest to use.

You can see from the above image, BE.com took 3.688 seconds to load. The main reason it was that long was because we have 9 blogs show up on our home page .. so it takes time to load all the 9 blogs.

One of the reasons web surfers were attracted to Google in the initial years (compared to msn, yahoo, ask jeeves etc…)  was because Google’s home page loaded so quickly and had such a simple interface.

One of the best ways to reduce load time for your website is to reduce the number of images or minimize the sizes of the images that the browser has to download while visiting the page.

For most of our articles we have started uploading GIF images rather than JPG because they are so much more smaller (sometimes by over 50 %). There is some loss of quality no doubt but if it takes 3 seconds to load a page compared to 6 I am totally up for it.

(Above, the page load times for some popular websites I visit. Google definitely is on top of it .. Microsoft, well they have a ton of images on theirs so I guess it kinda makes sense)

Of course all of this is relative to the internet connection you use. I use Broadband 7 Mbps … but if you are using the phone line it will be longer .. if you are using Gigabit Ethernet, it will be faster.

[ I know in my previous post Part - 5 I talked about uploading our articles at midnight rather than during the day. We ran into a bit of a problem last night .. so we are uploading our articles at 3 in the afternoon .. But I swear we will continue with our experiment more rigorously from now on and upload articles only at night time ]