We know all about this. If the homepage of a new site that we’re visiting takes a very long time to load, we are likely to back out to another site.

Test your site to ensure that the homepage takes no more than a few seconds to download and appear in a browser.

Here are some strategies for faster downloads:

• The images on your homepage are guaranteed to be the slowest the first time a visitor comes to your site because at that point the images are not cached yet. To combat this problem, use text as much as possible instead of graphics. HTML text is the first thing that downloads, so the visitor gets all the necessary text information without waiting for image to downloads.
• Use fast loading images to improve the speed of your site. Crop, shrink, reduce colors, and increase compression to make images smaller and faster to download.
• Use separate tables for page layout instead of one large HTML table. The problem with using a single large table is that it forces customers to wait until all of the images are loaded before they can see anything. If you separate your web page into multiple tables, people can see some parts of the page as it is loading.
• Avoid slow-loading content such as sounds, splash screens, animations, and Java Applets. If you include features such as these, not only will you make your main homepage slower to load, but you will risk having it look like the 2 examples shown below to visitors who do not have the latest technologies installed in their computers.