Speed of page download

Why are these sites different.

[Panic_Man]

My websites are very long sales letter style sites. I have learned this from Corey Rudl, the ecommerce wizz kid! His site has many more pictures than my site and is actually longer, BUT, it loads about 12 times quicker than my site. I would really appreciate any feedback on why this would be. I am not the technician for my site but HE is at a loss to explain this. Can anyone help me as I lose about 70% of my site visitors withing 30 seconds and I think this could be to blame! Thank you in advance. Charles

[edited by: oilman at 8:16 pm (utc) on May 25, 2004]
[edit reason] no specific urls please [/edit]

[jo1ene]

First off, you ended your sentence with your url so a period was added to the link. You're site didn't come up at first but I noticed the extra dot.

I tried both sites on my 56k connection and yours came up much faster. (In about a third of time as the other one.) I'm not sure why it would seem otherwise.

[bunltd]

Panic_Man, you might want to remove the url's from your post (see TOS [webmasterworld.com] #13)

It looks like your entire page is enclosed in one very long table. The page won't render until the whole table is downloaded. If you break it up into smaller tables, that will speed things up.

LisaB

[Panic_Man]

Thanbk you for that but I am still a bit puzzled as to why my visitors leave so quickly. I get about 30000 hits per month and 60% leave within 30 seconds...that's a big loss. Any ideas?

[jo1ene]

Thanbk you for that but I am still a bit puzzled as to why my visitors leave so quickly. I get about 30000 hits per month and 60% leave within 30 seconds...that's a big loss. Any ideas?

Maybe they were searching for something else, you came up and when they realized it wasn't quite what they wanted, they left. Are you sure you are targeting the right keywords? Do you have a traffic logger? If you check the logs you may find that the search strings people are using to get to your site are not quite on the mark.

Or maybe, you're not telling them what they want to know fast enough. The portion of the page that shows up in the window first is the most important. Maybe they can't figure out what to do next.

The other possiblity is that they just don't find your site appealing/interesting for whatever reason. Web surfers are fickle people.

I also wonder if it's not all that uncommon for any site to lose quite a few visitors in the first few moments.

Anyway, I tried to go back to the URL. (I saw it before it was edited out.) But I'm getting a "Connot find server" message. I'll check back later and tell you if anyting screams at me. I was only checking loading time last time I was there.