Slow loading site? Set your image sizes for an easy win!

This is a brilliant and simple tip Rob picked up today whilst working on increasing page load times. I’ll leave him to explain all the details whilst deftly cutting to the chase and stealing his thunder: explicitly set the size of your images to achieve speedy pages and happy managers.

This also led onto a conversation we had about page speed and how subjective it can be. One of the really easy traps to fall into is to use your own computer’s load speed as the gospel load time, and compare everything against that. Sure, it’s good for rough comparison against this and that, and for making really big wins, but once you’ve got those out the way and you start experimenting with changes which reduce load time by less than half a second each time you need to rethink your testing strategy. There’s just too much fluff between you and the server to give accurate, reliable readings.

One of the companies we’re eying up at the moment is WebMetrics. In a way, anyone who can break down your load times from a third-party, reliable and solid internet connection will do, but WebMetrics appear to be best-of-breed, certainly among the competition I’ve seen so far, in the level of detail they offer. If anyone else knows of good website statistics tools, I’d love to know what else is out there.