Introduction

Speed matters. If visitors are delayed waiting for your web page to load, they get annoyed. Make them wait a little longer, they just leave.Whether you're selling a product or putting forth a point, you don't want your visitors to be annoyed, and you sure don't want them to leave. This means your page must download quickly. Less than a second is a good goal.

Judging from their work product, some web designers appear to think that the only people they need to reach have 400Mb download speed. Their company offers cutting edge technological solutions, so they're not interested in farmers living in rural Kansas. Overlooking the snobbishness in this attitude, the fact is that many CEOs they're trying to attract spend time out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with speeds similar to a 2001 192Kb dialup modem. And some of the technologists CIOs trust live in apartment buildings with slow Internet, or even in houses on the side of town with a slow Internet provider.

And, of course, there are the prima-donna web designers who think their web pages are worth waiting for. Yes, it's true, some people are that in love with themselves.

The smart web designer has quick download as one of his or her priorities. That's what this document is all about.

Methods to Speed Download

One way to speed download is to use a CDN: Content Delivery Network.Doing so costs money and effort, but if the entire world is your audience, it's probably a good thing to do. I did a download speed test, for my Florida-hosted Validating and Debugging HTML, CSS and Javascript web page, on Pingdom Website Speed Test tool. It took less than 0.2 seconds to download in Washington DC, less than 0.5 seconds to download in San Francisco, but about 2.7 seconds to download in Sydney, Australia. I depend on book orders and courseware and course purchases worldwide, so I'll be investigating CDNs.

Of course, the benefit of a CDN is you're downloading from a nearby server.

Wrapup

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