My website is definitely loading slower than my competitors so much that on dial up I would lose customers. My competitors typically have more images than I do, so needs some advice as to why its slower. I have recently implemented Live Chat, would this be an issue? I also have hitslink stats. So I have 2 scripts pasted into my html for those. Would that cause the slowdown or is this just server issues with ?

It looks like has chat on the home page and it loads a lot quicker than mine. Can one of the gurus take a look and give me some advice on why its sluggish

Go to this website and enter your site into the size analyzer. If you take out your images, your index page "weighs" about 50k, which isn't bad. But your images take up an additional 303k. Looks like you have a lot of images on the front page -- might be a good idea to shrink the gifs and jpgs you are using down further, etc.

Hope that helps.

Yep.... that will speed it up.

What do you mean when you say shrink them? Is there a way to compress the images and scripts?

Nuitrition,

I just checked your homepage and it is 350K. All of the images are optimized (for speed) except the thumbnail images of your products. You can reduce these by reducing the size of the images... currently they are big and they are being scruntched to meet table height and width restrictions.

Modify the height and width of the image and this will reduce the file size!

Ok, understand...thanks for the advice.

If you have photoshop, you can also reduce the quality of the images, this will keep the images the same size on the screen, but reduce the size of the file so the load times are quicker. Most of my larger images are reduced to 80% quality which save on the file sizes and the quality is quite un-noticable.

You can go to Download.comand search for Easy Thumbnail. This will allow you to shrink the size of all of your graphics at one time.

Those are great suggestions thanks!