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Factors Affecting Web Page Loading

The loading time of a web page is directly affected by:

The visitor's web browser.
Older versions of Netscape Navigator are slower at loading animated gifs and graphics than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Apparently, the newest version of Netscape Navigator has remedied this problem.

SIDE NOTE #1:  Internet Explorer makes some animated gifs which have been "optimized" by the animator (i.e. compressed to reduce file size) appear "choppy" in appearance of motion, but, the same animated gif does not appear "choppy" when viewed with Netscape Navigator.

SIDE NOTE #2:  AOL's browser applies its own additional compression to images which reduces the loading time of still images and animated gifs, but in the process, also reduces the range of colors and creates a more grainy resolution.

The visitor's ISP (Internet Service Provider).
AOL and other large service providers have more people using their network and therefore, experience periods of "slow down" during the Internet's busy times. This rush-hour traffic usually occurs in the late afternoon and early evenings... sometimes, on weekends. Highspeed telephone access or cable access to the Internet is gaining more popularity, however, these ISPs also encounter periods of "slow-down" in their service because of heavy usage by consumers during peak hours.

The number of visitors currently surfing your web site.
If your web site's server is busy, then, pages load more slowly, including any animated gifs, graphics or scripting applications (CGI, Java, Javascript, and Java Applets) on the web pages.

The capabilities of your web site's server.
Some hosting services have very slow servers with limited Internet bandwidth.

The overall traffic on the Internet.
Since people visiting your web site have "pinged" off of several other servers before arriving at your web site's server, the loading time of your web pages depend upon the route that your visitor takes to get to your server. The more traffic that there is on the Internet, the slower the pings and the slower that your web pages load in the browsers of visitors. Visitors, who come from a large "geographical" distance from your server's location, will usually have more "pings" before landing on your server.

The number of animated gifs or graphics on your pages.
I recommend no more than 1 or 2 animated gifs (depending upon the file sizes of the animated gifs) per page. Since still image graphics are usually smaller in file sizes (if they are not too large in pixel size), you can often place more still image graphics on pages.
If you want animated gifs or graphics to load faster on your web pages, be sure to include the image's width and height in your HTML code.

SIDE NOTE #3:  If you have identical animated gifs or still images that appear on all of your web pages, these images will load only once into the temporary internet files folder of your visitor's computer and therefore, do not increase the loading time of each subsequent web page that is visited. Only new animated gifs or still images placed on subsequent web pages should be calculated as affecting the loading time.

When calculating the total loading time for each of your web pages, always add together the file sizes of:
- your html document
- any animated gifs on your page
- any still image graphics

Any scripting application (CGI, Java, Javascript, and Java Applets) will also affect the loading time of your web page, but, it is hard to calculate the effect since your server (OR the visitor's own computer) is responsible for serving up the scripts and as noted above, many factors affect the access of web pages. By the way, using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave does not necessarily reduce the loading time of web pages because of the variety of factors (mentioned above) that have a direct impact on loading times.