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Load Time Tip:
How Fast Are They Surfing?
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Internet users consistently cite slow-loading pages as their #1 complaint about the Web. But the load time of a Web page depends heavily on each visitor's connection speed. So how many of your visitors are browsing at different connection speeds?
The best information on this comes from Georgia Tech University's 10th GVU World Wide Web User Survey. The survey was conducted from October 10, 1998 through December 15, 1998 and includes data from over 5,000 Web surfers. As such it represents the most extensive survey of Internet usage patterns.
According to the GVU survey, 66% of users are surfing the Web using a 56kbps modem or slower. Overall, connection speeds were distributed as follows:
| 33k modem or slower |
35% |
| 56k modem |
31% |
| 128k ISDN line |
6% |
| 1Mbps (T1 line) or faster |
28% |
However, this number changes dramatically depending on geography. European users generally browse the Web using a higher speed connection than users in the United States. While only 26% of Americans use a 1 Mbps connection or faster, just over 42% of Europeans are connected at this speed or better.
This difference is mainly due to the place of access to the Internet. Europeans are more likely to access the Web from work, whereas Americans are more likely to browse from home. Fully 81% of Americans reported accessing the Web from home every day; only 55% of Europeans did so.
Whether they access the Web from work or home, Europeans are also far more likely than Americans to use a 128kps ISDN line. While only 4% of Americans use an ISDN line, fully 18% of Europeans use such a connection. This difference is due to the European telecom's greater commitment to ISDN.
Overall the speed of Internet access has also increased significantly over the past year. In 1997 only 14% of respondents were connected at T1 speeds or better, while fully 54% surfed the Web using a 33k modem or slower. Today those numbers have changed to 28% and 35%.
While that's good news overall, a significant number of your visitors are surfing the Web at slow connection speeds. Keep in mind that a page that requires 1 second to load over a T1 line takes fully 55 seconds to load over a 28.8k modem (ignoring the impact of server connections), and over a third of your visitors are browsing at about that speed.
How long does your Web site take to load? Find out using our Load Time Check robot (part of our HTML Toolbox suite of tools). And keep in mind that fat graphics are the leading cause of slow-loading pages. Use GIFBot to slim your graphics and you'll see a dramatic improvement in your load time.
Survey data copyright 1994-1998 Georgia Tech Research Corporation. All rights Reserved. Source: GVU's WWW User Survey, www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys
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