It used to be that when people worked on speeding up their pages, they focused primarily on the images and multimedia, trying to make them as optimized and slim as possible. But research has shown that as much as 80–90% of the time spent waiting for a page to load is waiting for numerous HTTP requests to be processed by the server. By reducing the number of requests you make for page elements, you can greatly improve your page load times. And with the techniques mentioned in this article, you won’t have to give up fancy design or images to do it.
Just Optimizing Images Doesn’t Cut it for Speeding Up Pages
By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com Guide September 6, 2010
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Well, well, well! You finally found out that it’s about the load on the server. It only took you about three years for you to admit it.
@Ted: Thanks for the comment. You are correct that server load time does greatly impact the time it takes for a web page to load, that seems fairly self-evident to me.
Of course, the article wasn’t really talking about that so much as the sheer number of times you make a request to a server. For example 1 image request will be faster than 10, whether the server has a high load or not.
What have you done to improve your server’s load times?
Very nice…
Are you going to talk about using compression on the server?
I wrote an article on gzip compression a couple days before this post: How to Compress Websites with Gzip Compression – Speed Up Your Sites with Gzip Compression