Fast loading websites
It is a quite clear that a slow loading website will waste the visitors' time and probably, or mostly they try to view another website instead of yours.

At the other face of the coin, a fast loading website, which allow the visitors to go through the website, navigate it, read the information on it, and probably use your services or buy your products from your website.
One of the most common parts among people who are designing and running their websites by themselves, that they add much more heavy photos and heavy flash animations on their home page.

Probably it looks nice, and looks very well designed, but so heavy to load, and waste the visitor's valuable time and make them decide to close the browser and search for another website to purchase a product or a service from it. And you lose a potential customer.
You have a T1? Cable modem, or DSL connection?

Well, not all of your visitors as lucky as you to have a fast internet connection, as there is a huge number of your potential customer who are using a Dialup connection to the internet, which means that the loading speed on your own computer is totally different from their own loading speed.

Always keep in your mind when you design your website that it be fast loading on slow connections such as the dialup.

It is not only about the loading speed of your own website, but also it is related to wasting your own bandwidth.

For example, a lot of persons when they design websites of their own, they add a very nice soft music at the website's background. This is one of the most successful ways to lose a good amount of your own bandwidth, and probably effect on the common loading time of the website page.

Far from music backgrounds, I take another example, Photos and Pictures. That looks great to have a website with related photos on it. But most of the people forget about the picture's size!!

Optimizing pictures for internet is such an important issue to consider before adding any images or pictures on your website.

Some website templates use the pictures as a main part of the layout look and feel, so if the pictures and photos are slow loading, it means that your template will lose its value, as it will not load fast, so the visitor will have a bad impression about the website even before he/she navigate your website.

Another element that may cause a slow loading, is what I call them "High-Way-Pages"!

Such long pages can cause slow loading time, so I would suggest that be sure that your home page is not so long. If you have to add a lot of text and content on your home page, then probably you can split the content into two or three pages, with adding "Next" link.