EXTREMELY SLOW download speed

[ncruz]

Our website www.visioninvestment.com is hosted in Asia. European/US audience have been complaining the extremely slow. We were told that the best option is to create a mirror site. Is there other options? We do have some flash but how can we determine if it is "too much". I don't even know WHAT to ask our web vendor.

Any advice would be helpful.

p.s. we're not IT people so need do not speak the pros language :)

[calypso_webmaster]

I don't see where you are having people download off of your site.

If you are talking about your site loading slow. It coudl be anything from your images not being optimized enough, to having to much running in the background. maybe it is the flash, remember some people are still on dial up so flash to them is slow..

Other then that could be with your servers, perhaps they are having probs with their bandwidth.

I hope some of this helped.?

Thanks,

[Dragonsi]

It looks like you have a large Flash intro. I waited about 30 secs and it was only 10% complete, needless to say I gave up (like a high percentage of web users will).

Either drop the intro screen or create a mirror site that has no fancy flash junk (I dislike flash - to over used) - You could create a intro screen that gives your visitors the option >> dial-up >> ADSL

hope this helps...

[bMind]

Hello,
Tested your site with 28.8k dial up connection. After 2 mins of waiting for your flash to load which was at 23%, i gave up like Dragonsi.

I didn't see 'Skip Intro' anywhere on the page and I think that's pretty important that you should include so your users have an option to go directly to the main page.

Seems like a nice site, will check it out when i get home with ADSL connection.

[jestep]

Didn't know you posted twice so I'll post again.

The page does have a slow download speed. 2 reasons that I see in perticular.

Global Statistics
Total HTTP Requests: 7
Total Size: 115088 bytes

Object Size Totals
Object type Size (bytes)
HTML: 3162
Images: 111858
Javascript: 287
CSS: 68
Multimedia: 0
Other: 0

Speed without the Flash animation
14.4K 90.60 seconds
28.8K 46.00 seconds
33.6K 39.63 seconds
56K 24.34 seconds
ISDN 128K 8.42 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 2.01 seconds


1. Very large flash animation at the top. This is definately going to slow everything down. As a reference most people won't wait more than 10 - 15 seconds to see content. I am sharing a full T1 connection with about 5 people and the page took about 35 seconds to load. This is very long. On a dial up or even a cable or DSL modem the flash would take well over a minute to load.

2. The image lanjguageselect.jpg, is very large and not optimized. If you can resize the image to the correct size, and use an image compression program to reduce the size. Ulead makes a good one with a free trial called smart saver. If you have Adobe photoshop is also has a feature called save for web which does the same thing.

Right now, most visitors will leave or enter the site before the flash gets anywhere near fully loaded.

[ncruz]

We'll work with our webmaster on this, hopefully will get this resolved soon.

[jestep]

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Here is the tool I use to check download speed.

[ncruz]

Our web designer has removed the counter embedded in the webpage for us as he believe that was the reason for the long loading time - Can someone visit the link below and see if the loading speed has improved?

This is the web without counter: www1.visioninvestment.com

When I tried to time the loading speed locally, there isn't much of a difference.

[Dragonsi]

On a 46.6Kbps dial-up

after 2 mins > 36% complete (still painfully slow)

at least this time, I could select which language - then it preseeded to continue and load more waistful graphics and shockwave....

I'm sorry, but unless I needed to view this site and was just a normal potential client, I would give up and try someone else - this is not good for business.

I suspect that evan on a standard domestic 512Mb ADSL - this site would site be too slow. Drop the flashy intro and just have well optimised and presented standard graphics or small snippets of Flash/shockwave...