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How long does it take for your website to load? Do you know? Have you ever thought about it? You should...

How long does it take to lose a potential client? That may depend on how long it takes for your website to load.

Is it that simple?  It can be, so I wanted to go over some tips to get your download speed up up up!

A common misconception is that you have no control over the size of your website or over how quickly (or not) that it loads for your website visitors.  Sure, there are several factors which are out of your hands such as the visitor's connection speed, a high volume of Internet traffic, etc.  But there is plenty that you can do to make it better.

The main thing that directly affects the download speed of your home page is the file size.  Most experts say that a page on your site (including and especially your home page) should not exceed 100 kilobytes (KB).  To find out the size of your homepage, open it in your browser (Internet Explorer).  Next, go to the 'File' menu and choose the 'Properties' option.  You will see the 'Size' section with a number given in bytes.  One thousand bytes equal roughly 1 KB.  So if your home page is 30050 bytes, it is roughly 30 KB.  Once you know the size of your home page, write it down and read on.

Even if you did not meet or exceed that 100 KB threshold, you may have images on your page that are not being included in that number.  The next step is to see if any of your images are particularly large in file size.  To do this, right click on an image and choose the 'Properties' option.  You will again see the size given in bytes.  Make a note of any file sizes that seem to be larger than most of your other image file sizes.

You can also use an online tool such as Cyber-Junkie to help you with your inventory.  This tool will also give the sizes in bytes.  When using this tool, you will see an item called HTML; that is going to match the size you see when you go to the 'File' menu and choose 'Properties'.  This will generally be a total of all the other files you see listed.

As you will soon realize, images take up the most file space.  Without images, your page would be the fastest loading site around... of course, without images you might lose visitors just as easily as you would with a super slow download speed.  So you have to strike a balance.

First, let's go back to the large image file sizes.  An image may display on your website as small or moderately sized, however that does not mean the file itself isn't quite large.  For example, perhaps you uploaded a listing photo from your digital camera that is at a very high resolution.  Then you added it to your home page, saw that it was too large, so you clicked on it and dragged to shrink it down.  All set, right?  Wrong.  The file is still the same file, large as ever.  It's just being squished to fit in the space you want it to occupy.  So that gigantic file is still going to take longer to load.  The image itself needs to be resized.

To resize an image once it has already been uploaded to your Virtual Office, go to Design Center, then File Library.  Find your image and select it.  Click on the 'Modify Image' button.  Your first option will be to resize the image.  You will see the dimensions of the image (width and height) measured in pixels.  Enter the desired width or height of the image, then check the 'constrain' box under the dimension you are adjusting.  This will resize your image proportionately.  Click the 'Resize' button.  You will see an 'Image Resized' message when the resize is done.  Click on the 'Done' button at the bottom to complete the process and return to the File Library.

A larger image is about 500 pixels wide; anything larger than that on your homepage is a little overboard.  And even 500 pixels wide is pretty large.  Click here to see a sample image.  The black square image is 500 pixels wide and 375 pixels high.  If we resize the image to be 250 pixels wide, we have a much more website friendly image display size and file size.  Click here to see the smaller image.  The first image is 24 KB and the second is 1 KB.  It makes a big difference.

Images that are part of your slideshows also make a difference and should be resized as well.  When you load them into a slideshow, the program will display them at the size of your show, but as with the other images, the actual file size remains the same as the original image file.

Once you have reduced the size of your images, check your home page size again.  Depending on how large your files were, you may see a significant difference.  Test your loading time again at Cyber-Junkie to check on your progress.  If you are still over the 100 KB mark by a lot you may want to think about moving some of your images to other pages of your website to spread them out a bit.

Looking ahead, be sure to resize your images to the the display size that you want them to be initially.  Changing the dimensions of an image can significantly reduce file size and have a very positive affect on the load time of your website.  You can do this in your own photo editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop) or within your Virtual Office File Library.

Don't forget that we have several resources for you if you need assistance.  Our Customer Support team is available 7 days a week (Monday - Friday 7 AM - 6 PM Pacific, Weekends 7 AM - 4 PM Pacific) 1-877-518-1571 Support@AdvancedAccess.com, and our Advanced Access member Forums are open 24/7 for posting.