The speed of a website is as much about user perceptions as it is about quick loading pages.

Quick loading

The Internet is often called the information super-highway, but bandwidth is always a precious resource. An effective website uses every technical trick in the book to provide pages that are small in size and fast loading. There are two aspects to a fast loading webpage:

• Firstly, the total size or amount of data contained in a webpage determines how long a browser will take to download the page. The smaller the amount of data the quicker a page will download.
• Secondly, the way a webpage is structured affects the order in which parts of the webpage are displayed in the browser. Information of immediate relevance to the user should always appear first with other or additional information appearing later.

User perceptions

Small technically well designed web pages are nothing if users still perceive a website as slow. Recent studies of web users reveal that user perception of website speed is more about how easily they can achieve their intended tasks rather than absolute page download times. Users rated one website faster than another even though the "faster" website's pages actually took three times as long to download.

How is this possible? When users successfully complete their tasks on a site they do not feel that their time has been wasted. If a user wastes time on a site it will be perceived as slow no matter how fast the pages display (see User Interface Engineering The Truth About Download Time world.std.com/~uieweb/truth.htm ).