For the past week I have been on a very slow internet connection. Not because I want to but because it's my only option. Many times I will get upwards 1KB/sec! That's slow! Some pages won't even load - while others, relatively speaking, load blazing fast.

So I did a bit of research on why some pages load fast and why others not at all. This article covers what I found.

HTTP Requests

The number of HTTP requests is the leading factor for page load times. Websites above 30 requests normally won't even load for me. An HTTP request isn't just the query to the page, one has to be sent out for each file used on the site. Using the firefox extention FireBug allows us to easily see this. My site makes 7:

As you can see, the size differences here don't mean anything, the number of requests means everything. Some requests simply take a while before they get through. Again, this is the same for high speed connections... just not amplified quit as much...

The browser will only do so many requests simultaneously. When you have 30 requests on your page it can really bog your load time down.

I could make my site load even faster by combining my two css files into one and getting rid of google analytics... but I don't think 7 is too many requests.

There are other things that determin your load times but this is the big one. Size matters but not so much on high speed internet. The number of HTTP requests makes an impact with all connection speeds.

For further learning I suggest you check out Yahoo's YSlow.