You’ve made a webpage, but people are complaining that it’s too slow to load.
It may be that they have a slow computer, or it may be that your webpage has too many large files in it, and it should be made smaller. Safari can tell you how many files it needs to load, and how big they are. Here’s how.
1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.
2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’
3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.
You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:
You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.
As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!
If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.
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