A fast-loading web page, especially the first page on a user's first visit, helps build confidence and makes that user more likely to stay. If you run a business-related site you should care about this: a site that runs like treacle gets in the way of delivering your proposition.
Page load speed is indeed now one of Google's metrics for ranking search results – and the need for speed is why I've been messing around with my private and public clouds rather than running everything off my office desk over cheap ADSL.
A page should render well within about 7s or visitors will give up. My long-term target is to have my pages complete loading in 100ms, but given that just one DNS lookup can take 300ms even when everything goes right, 1s to have everything essential on the user's screen is my working target for now.
This will be possible if your site is text-based that even a slow connection can load it properly...
wheel
4:32 pm on Sep 14, 2011 (gmt 0)
I'm not sure I see the need for CDN to achieve speed unless you're international. A decent national hosting company with a decent colo can achieve speeds as fast as you want. Throw in gziping and some decent coding, and IMO you've got everything you need.
Peer sharing was one of the things I went looking for when I picked my last hosting company. They're peer shared with every major ISP in my country and Google, on fiber to anywhere else relevant to me. Visitors on any major ISP go right from their ISP almost directly to my server.
tangor
8:32 pm on Sep 14, 2011 (gmt 0)
I was intrigued by one of the tools and their results... a site (hobby) loads at 2.244s and, because it is a traditional "framed" site has additional baggage for frames off browsers (hence a double load of navigation). Makes me contemplate a rethink on the offering, though a 2 sec load time is very reasonable (coming from a Canadian server for US/World access...
Sgt_Kickaxe
1:01 am on Sep 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
Remove any and all 3rd part javascript files. Unfortunately that means analytics, +1, extra adsense units, 3rd party search boxes etc. Each one adds significant delay to page speed just by being there and in some cases (adsense) up to 9 javascript files are included PER UNIT.
Less is more.
tangor
1:11 am on Sep 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
All good advice... but I don't use JS and this site has no "g" stuff (analytics, etc.) but does have a single third party search. Secondary test removing that (via the same tools indicated above) resulted in a .5 sec difference. Not willing to give it up for that "eye blink"... :)
incrediBILL
3:47 am on Sep 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
Having javascript and other things aren't really a problem if you design your page to load things in a proper order
I make sure my page framework loads and displays quick, while Adsense, images and other js stuff does it's thing after the initial page display. Makes the impression MY pages load quick and Google ads do not ;)
Old smoke and mirror speed tricks
tangor
4:02 am on Sep 15, 2011 (gmt 0)
@incrediBILL: your speed results using the tools mentioned above? (no doubt you, like me, have it tight and fast, but dang curious)...
