If it takes more than just a very few seconds for your product sales page to load, visitors will click away in droves. There is no magic number but if your page is taking more than three seconds to load you need to work some magic on it.
One problem is when someone creates a new sales page they will visit it frequently while creating and tweaking up the copy. Their web browser will cache the page content. The browser does this because the content, especially the images, will load faster from the local computer than from the network. So once their page is cached it will load faster for them than it will for a visitor coming to that page for the first time. The person who created the page thinks all is well, but new visitors may find it loading terribly slow.
Of course usually the things that cause slow load times are the images on the page. There are several things to consider in placing images on a web page. The first thing I recommend is going to PingDom and testing the load speed of your sales page–it’s free to use. You simply input your URL there and in just a few seconds you are provided not only with time time your page took to load but tons of other valuable data as well.
Pingdom will show you exactly the time required for each image to load as well as how long it took to load the HTML, and CSS files, and javascript, the time for DNS calls and much more. They provide you with both numerical data and a graphical representation that lets you see the total load time as well as the load times for every asset on your page. You can immediately identify where the loading blockages occur on your page so you can remedy the problem. Again, it is most likely that the images you use are what involve the most time in loading.
There are several pages on the pingdom site. Many involve paid access but you don’t want those. The free website load time tester is at… Pingdom
One word of caution when using Pingdom. Just to the right of where you input your URL they ask you where you want your page tested from. In the U.S. they have servers in New York City, Dallas, and San Jose. They also have servers in Melborne and Stockholm. I would select the test server closest to where you think most of your visitors will come from.
But after you do your first test, they will rotate the server to another city. Make sure you click to get the same server location if you tweak up your site and go to test it again or else your load times will be skewed by comparison. For example, I just tested the sales page for my http://infoproductearningsclub.com product from both the New York server and the Melbourne server at Pingdom.
Load time from New York server 831 ms
Load time from Melbourne server 1,440 ms
That’s quite a difference. Try out Pingdom yourself before you turn your your sales page loose on the world. It can help you see what is taking up the most load time on your page.