Why Speed Kills And How To Go Faster

If the loading speed of your website is to slow it can kill your business. People are just not willing to wait a long period of time for your website to load.

As we develop our showcase Premium Website package on MoreChristLike.Com we are keeping an eye on the loading speed.

pingdom has a very nice service that shows you your total load time and a graph of each object (image, script, css, and html files) and how how long it takes to load.

For example CNN.COM loads consistently within 4 to 5 seconds. Here is the CNN.COM specs.

Total loading time:4.2 seconds
Total objects:143 (1323.8 KB)
HTML:3 (205.3KB)
CSS:4 (116.2KB)
Scripts:18 (520.5KB)
Images:117 (481.8KB)

In the above sample you can see above CNN.COM has 143 objects which are 1323KB in size and took 4.2 seconds to load.

We tested the MoreChristLike.Com base site with only 1 blog post and it took 6.2 seconds. Here are the MoreChristLike.Com specs with 1 blog post.

Total loading time:6.2 seconds
Total objects:73 (509.9 KB)
HTML:3 (61.1KB)
CSS:11 (63.3KB)
Scripts:15 (285.1KB)
Images:43 (100.5KB)

The site has been displaying 20 blog posts on the home page. With 20 blog posts the loading speed when from 6.2 seconds to 10 seconds. Here are the specs for MoreChristLike.Com specs with 20 blog post.

Total loading time:10 seconds
Total objects:104 (1833.5 KB)
HTML:3 (276.2KB)
CSS:11 (63.3KB)
Scripts:15 (285.1KB)
Images:70 (1176KB)

So the number of the total objects when from 73 to 104 and the size in kilobytes when from 509KB to 1833KB.

Now we have MoreChristLike.Com set up to only display 5 blog posts on the home page and our loading speed is 6.8 seconds.

So the bottom line is we are concerned about the speed of the websites we are hosting on our server and we are working to optimize the Premium Website package so that it will load faster.

Here is one of the graphs the report from pingdom producted for MoreChristLike.Com.