It is essential for any website to have a quick loading time. The faster it loads the quicker your customers/visitors see your website or product. SO many websites fail because they have slow loading pages which is not always caused by the host alone.
Here are a few things you can look out for to see how fast your website loads.
1. Checking a loading time
If you think your page is really quick or mabey want to see what difference in loading time 2 different page layouts have then you really want a way to check your loading speed. There are of course some software which can be bought to do this job but I personally use Webwait (link at end of post). It is a totally free online system which allows you to test a page for any number of times with a gap of your choice inbetween tests.
A great table is created showing slowest, fastest and average. This will allow you to see how your page loads, you can then compare it to a similar website with similar content to see how it compares.
2. Checking your content
If you know your website is loading slow in comparison to other similar sites, or just generally loading slow then it is now time to look at your content, including the site layout you are using. NOw alot of sites are slow because they use very heavy, graphic intensive layouts. Graphical layouts look great and are brilliant when on a fast host and being viewed on a fast internet connection but when either of these is slow it really knocks the website down and makes users less happy about viewing it.
The layout is not always to blame and alot of bloggers have 3 or 4 huge images in their posts. These images are normally originals that have not been scaled for online usage which effects loading time. If you have five posts on the home page each with 2 images then the page is loading 10 images (not including any layout images or ads) which may be fairly large.
3. Check Your Host
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