“I can’t wait another second!”

By Paula Mariedaughter and Jeanne Neath

Seconds seem like hours when you are staring at a computer screen! Don’t lose customers who won’t wait. If you believe you have a problem with slow loading pages on your site, start your troubleshooting with the easiest thing to change: graphics.

Large graphics or high-resolution graphics are the most common cause of slow loading pages. Some people use high-resolution graphics believing this will create a sharper picture. Not true! Any setting higher that 72 ppi (pixels per inch) does not improve appearance and takes much longer to load.

If you decide to use a background graphic, do not use a graphic the size of the web page as it will slow everything down. Ideally, you will want to use a small, low-resolution image. Your web page will seamlessly repeat the image across and down the page.

If you are experiencing a slow shopping cart (or other dynamic page) your problem can be harder to diagnose and more complicated to correct. Most web pages are simple, static pages that display unchanging text and unchanging graphics. By contrast, dynamic pages, such as the shopping cart, are created using complex computer languages. These workhorse pages respond to your customers’ choices and do tasks for you such as checking out your customers. If one of these dynamic pages slows down, it will help you figure out your problem if you have a general understanding of how your web site operates.

Your web host provides a remote computer that serves up your web site to the Internet every hour of the day. That computer, known as a “server,” does a good deal of work when it handles a dynamic page, such as when your customers are looking at products or checking out. Several different circumstances can make the server work slowly.

• You are sharing space on the server with many other web sites and one or more of the other sites are using most of the server’s available resources.
• You have many visitors shopping on your site and their demands are overloading the capacity of the server.
• Your dynamic web pages are using too much of the server’s resources and the pages need to be modified.