How Fast is Your Website?

When someone requests a page from your church website, a number of things are happening at the same time.

• The user's computer checks a domain name server (DNS) server to find your domain.
• The browser checks its cache to see if it has a copy of your page. If not, it goes to the server and requests the page.
• When the page is requested from the server, the server does some determination to find the requested page. On an iMinistries site, there are a few steps required to correctly get the right page.
• Now the browser pulls apart the HTML from the page to see whether or not there's anything else to request. If your page contains any images, stylesheets, javascript, flash or videos, the browser checks its cache to see whether it has a copy of any of these files. If not, the file is requested from the server.
• The first time a user visits your site, this may mean a significant wait time as each item is downloaded.

Do you know what a first time visitor to your website has to download? You should.

We do everything we can to make the parts of your iMinistries website that we control lean and lightweight. We send relatively little HTML through. We include only the necessary javascript files on your site and we do what we can to maintain lightweight CSS files. However, this is only what we control. What about what you control?

You can easily find out. We would suggest you visit the following site:

WebSiteOptimization.com

Enter your site's URL and see the results. Remember, we're living in the Web world. Most users are too impatient to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. The good news is that much of the content on your page is going to get cached after the user visits the first page of your site, but if you visit your Site Watcher page, you will notice that it isn't uncommon for a user to move on from your site after simply visiting your homepage.

My advice is that you ask yourself how important each image and flash file you have on your site (especially your home page) is to the overall goal of your site. Without doubt some will be worthy of your user's wait time. It's up to you to try to determine which items aren't.