Home>Section 1 Main Page>File Size and Download Time

"Pages take too long to load. Perhaps the pages have one or more large graphics, or a huge chunk of scrolling text, or fanciful animations, or (God forbid) a large number of banners accessing other sites which themselves are slow. All of these items can cause a page to load very slowly, while the person attempting to view the site gets more and more impatient. Remember: unless you are designing a corporate intranet site, most people are viewing your site over a dial-up line - and that is not likely to change for the next few years." (1)

With the advent of high speed/broadband Internet access such as cable, DSL and satellite, it is easy for those who have it to forget the slow download times of standard dial-up connections. But as anyone with high speed access knows, if that connection goes down, you might have to revert to dial-up for awhile, and the experience of going back to the slow connection is a real wake-up call.

The fact is, only about 20% or so of home Internet connections are high speed (from A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use Of The Internet); that means that around 80% of home users connect to the internet via a 56k modem at best. Many still have 28k modems. It will likely be quite a while before most homes have broadband access, due to the higher cost and limited availability of these services. Even businesses and schools, which may have a main broadband Internet connection, might experience relatively slow connection speeds at the desktop computer due to software that filters content and scans for viruses.

The point is- web sites should be designed with slow user connections foremost in mind.

So what does that mean? First, a person creating a web site has no control over users' Internet connections, web server capacity and speed, and the overall "health" of the Internet at any given time (sometimes crazy things happen, like trucks carrying cranes crashing into highway overpasses that have fiber optic cables underneath, and those cables get cut, dramatically slowing the data traffic on the Internet).

What the web site creator does have control over is the size of the files that make up the pages in his or her web site. The bigger the size of a page (i.e. the more graphics/special effects on it and the bigger/longer the page is) the more time it takes to download.

What are acceptable download times, from a user's perspective?

"One tenth of a second (0.1) is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result. This would be the response time for any applets that allow users to move, zoom, or otherwise manipulate screen elements in real time.
One second (1.0) is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to remain uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data. Getting a new page within a second means that the user arrived at the page without undue delay.
Ten seconds (10.0) is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users turn to other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish. Getting a new page within 10 seconds, while annoying, at least means that the user can stay focused on navigating the site." (3, pp. 42-44)

How can the web creator control file sizes? Continue on to the next page to find out!