Hello!

I have created a web site in ASP.NET 2.0 - it uses themes and master pages. The web site loads slowly. It allways does. I have placed it on two seperate servers - and it still loads slowly on both... here are the addresses:

http://development.callamfletcher.com
http://www.callamfletcher.com

I have implemented caching so that if you click on a page that has been loaded within the previous 60 seconds - it will load fast - but is there no way to improve the initial loading time?

Web.config debug is set to false. I compiled it though "publich web site" and unticked all three boxes.

Please hit me with any suggestions - everything is much appreciated! Thanks! :) - Callam

hi,

How fast does your website load and how fast should it be? It is often said that sites that load that load in a split second are more popular and attract more attention. But how many websites actually load in a split second?

The most popular websites on the web today do load quickly. For example, yahoo.com and google.com which contain simple text and a few small images load on average in 1 second which is incredible. Amazon.com which has dynamic content and numerous images loads in about  5 seconds on average and the popular online auction house, eBay.com, can take even longer to load.

Many big brand websites don’t meet the standard of page load response times; therefore, should you be worried that your website doesn’t load in a split second? The bottom-line is it depends on you. You need to take into consideration business objectives for your website before deciding to have your web pages load as quickly as possible.

E-commerce websites, which have more images and use a database back-end, will take longer to render a web page. For websites that contain pages with more than 10 images shown on a web page, consider two suggestions:

First, host images on a separate web server than the main web server. This allows a web page to load quickly in the client’s browser. To the user, the page will appear to load very quickly, even though the entire page has not completely loaded all of the images.

Second, don’t run the database server for the website on the same machine as the web server. When push comes to shove for machine resources, both the web server and database server will slug it out and slow all operations down.

For all websites, consider server side caching your best friend. The .NET framework includes useful built-in caching to conserve server resources and offers a considerable boost in performance over standard ASP driven websites. Also recommended is Port 80 Software’s httpZip which can handle web pages, regardless of how they are created whether it is ASP, ASP.NET, PHP , or HTML.

Take into account all of the pieces of software needed to create the pages on your website and constantly work on different aspects to achieve performance gains.

Hi jessjing,

Thanks for your reply. I agree that it does depend on one's business objectives. In my case this is a web design company web site and i want to reduce loading times to a minimum.

I guess my question is more technical. How would i implement server-side caching for EVERY visit? The web site is made up of themes and master pages etc - but the content is not dynamic. I simply want to cache this web site on the server for ever. Because of the low number of visits it is no good caching it for 60 seconds - or even anything like that - because the liklihood of another visiter arriving within those 60 seconds is very low.

The web site is more or less the only one on the server - so i'm not too bothered about resources. Could you - or somone else - provide me with an example of how to implement effective caching in this scenario?

I appreciate your help on this ;) - Callam