Claranet Enterprise - upgrade to Professional - will this improve loadup time?

[paulbeckett]

All

Due to the amount of imagery I have on my pages and accross the entire site - my website is becoming quite slow at some time.

I understand this is due to imagery - although some pages that contain fewer images and it is still quite slow. For instance, my home page has 90kb worth of images (ish) and at times it takes a while for the images to appear (although the header and left hand nav appear sooner). Indeed I know I would of given up on the site a couple of times had I have been a customer and seen nothing!

If I was to increase my hosting package would this make any difference (e.g. is their anything I can do on the server side). For Claranet users - would increasing from the Enterprise to the Professional package make any difference?

Paul

[wjcampbe]

Unfortunately it's not the capacity of your tap that controls the flow, but the customers pipe diameter.

The only way to get more of your content along the customers pipe is to compress your content.

[fleetwood]

Paul
We have been with Claranet from the start of our site (2002), and overall, speed has improved dramtically over the last year or 2.
Whether this is due to our gradually working our way up the server scale (currently paying £399pa, whichever package that is), or whether 'tis a result of all their servers being upgraded (which they did last year), its difficult to say.
When I enquired, they said that going upscale dosen't change the physical server, just your space and bandwidth allowance, but in practice, I've noticed significant speed improvements with each upgrade step we've paid for.

Having said that, what Bill said is spot on.

You really need to look at optimising your page loading times.
For image heavy pages, this means making sure all your images are optimised, and as small and compressed as you can make them, without compromising quality.
Any decent image package can usually help optimise your images (we use compupic - really useful, nice and cheap, and adobe photoshop - lovely stuff, but very expensive).
Try resampling a few images at lower res, and viewing at same size you display online - you might be surprised at what you can get away with.
The lower the finished size, and finished resolution, the smaller the file, the faster the display time.
If you can't optimise the images any further, and page time is still too slow, condiser reducing the number of images per page, or display thumbnails which link to larger images.

MArtin

[jont]

You can also look at using the progressive settings to display a progressively better quality of image as the page loads - this can add to the file over-head silghtly though and is only of use for say large product images and not for making up page layouts etc.

If you feel the site is optimised try asking CLARA to move you to a different server - one that isn't sharing with busy sites ... or upgrade to your own server to gain extra speed

[paulbeckett]

Hi

Thanks for your comments.

I thought my site is relatively optimised image wise (I use ImageReady).

Do you think 220kb (my home page) is too high for a page? What is a recommend limit on page size?

Source code is 31kb
Images is c. 190kb
Total = 220kb

Paul

[pinbrook]

it always used to be recommended that each page was no more than 40kb, now with broadband you can get away with 75kb as a rule of thumb

[Bob Isaac]

Paul

Post the URL and let us take a look.

Bob

[paulbeckett]

Thanks.

the home page is www.kjbeckett.com

From the sounds of it, the page size is way too high!

If this is the case I need to look to reduce the image sizes throughout my site.

I will look to see if there is any software that measures page sizes.

Paul

[wjcampbe]

Your home page seems to be fine at just over 34k, but the cufflinks page is a bit on the large size. I use the Page Info tool built into Opera 9.0 to check out the site - here is a screen shot of the details on page 1 of your cufflinks.

[pinbrook]

not convinced your data is correct, Bill

the wallet image on the index page is 43 k alone.

[Duncan Rounding]

I judge my page size by saving as .mht and seeing the resultant file size. It may not be very scientific but good for comparison I think. Out of interest Amazon saves as 293k, Argos 140k, Dabs 360k, Dell 247k, Walmart 334k, Tesco 154k, Asda 349k, My site 300k, KJBeckett 300k.
The biggest noticable difference (on my broadband) between the big boys and KJBeckett for example was not size but speed of delivery, very much faster servering. (Although I imagine that the serving speed has less of an impact with dialup)

[wjcampbe]

@Jo,

I had never noticed, but the Page Info button only reports code specific size, so you are right - its not a good way to measure page size. I'll have to get myself a new tool.

[fleetwood]

Paul
First up, home page loads up without any delay on my PC, with 2meg broadband.
Took a look at the wallet image, which comes in at 43k, and resaved it in Photoshop (using 'save for web'), at medium and high settings, resulting in a 5k and 10k file.




Take a look and see if you think they are acceptable qulaity, or if they have degraded too much for your liking, as doing this you are looking at a saving of 75-85% in file size!

Martin

[chris ashdown]

Paul

I have just upgraded to "Adobe Photoshop Elements 4" from ver 2 and found great changes

You have the ability to change to compression online whist you view before and after

best of all it cost under £50 from QVC

Just in the process of changing all my front pages which are really over commpressed to new standard

[paulbeckett]

Many thanks.

I think I am going to optimise my top level pages (e.g. front page and top section pages that hold thumnails).

Duncan

You state "The biggest noticable difference (on my broadband) between the big boys and KJBeckett for example was not size but speed of delivery, very much faster servering. (Although I imagine that the serving speed has less of an impact with dialup)".

I dont fully understand about speed of delivery / serving speed. Is this something I am in control of or claranet or neither?

Paul