Another minute of my life was wasted today — the clock ticking away as I waited for yet another “artistic” website to finish loading in my browser.
It got me thinking about why anyone would make their website so feature-intensive that it would slow down the page load time.
“It Works On My Computer…”
I imagined the business owner sitting in the web designer’s office, oohing and aahing over the pretty graphics of the soon-to-be-released website. The graphics loaded so fast. The functionality was divine. Surely everyone would be amazed at the designer’s genius.
Unfortunately, the site owner didn’t understand that the testing environment makes a huge difference. Of course a web site will function perfectly when it’s sitting neatly bundled up on a single computer. But how will the same site function out on the public web?
Here are a few guidelines that will help you avoid the risk of releasing a web site that looks great in the lab but fails to keep up on the world wide web.
Test Early and Often
Don’t wait until your web designers have invested weeks in writing the code to make the site functional. Test the design from the concept stage forward. Insist on seeing mockups and conducting usability reviews before a line of code is ever written. The sooner you catch a bad design, the easier it is to fix it.
Test On Multiple Computers
A graphics- and Flash-heavy page may work wonderfully on a designer’s souped-up computer, but how will the page function on a 3-year-old desktop at the local library? What about a smartphone with a bad wireless connection? What about a laptop sitting at Panera Bread, sharing the wifi with the other 60 people in the restaurant during the lunch rush?
Just because a site performs quickly on the designer’s computer, doesn’t mean it will function as well on an average system. So try it on your old laptop. Try it from your smartphone. Have your grandmother get online and see if she can figure out how to use the site.
Clear Your Browser Cache First
Graphics-heavy sites load much faster the second time around, since a lot of the files get cached on your computer. But what about the first-time visitor to your site? Unless you’ve got one heck of an incentive for folks to wait, they’re not going to stick around for more than a few seconds while all those pretty pictures to load.
The first-time load is critical. Make sure it’s (almost) as fast as future loads.
Test In Real-World Conditions
All these suggestions really boil down to one thing: test your site in real conditions, with real users, on average computers.
Test at every step of the design process; it may seem like a pain, but a little bit of extra effort early on will lead to fewer disgruntled visitors when your site goes live.
And don’t we all want our visitors to be happy?
