Checking the Speed of Your Site using FrontPage 2000

by David Berry
Sept 5th, 1999

Have you ever gone to a site that takes forever to download because the amount or size of the graphics, the amount of text, the use of Java Applets and so forth?  When you visit a site like this, how often do you click the Stop button and move on before viewing the whole site?  Well, if you're like me it's a lot. 

We live in a fast-paced world and when people want information they want it quickly. With so MANY sites to choose from on the Internet these days - Speed Counts!  After you've spent all that time creating your site, wouldn't it be nice if people actually looked at it?  If you've developed a site that takes forever to load chances are they won't stay very long and they won't come back.

In designing our sites we often forget three important points.

1. Not everyone has the same speed modem we do, or the latest fastest modem (Yes, there are still some 28.8 users out there);

2. Not everyone, depending on line noise etc, can always connect at a high speed;

3. And finally, the average person is paying an hourly rate for connecting to the Internet.  Yes, we don't all have "unlimited" access accounts.

Although point 3 isn't as bad as it once was, now that many ISPs offer unlimited access, time is still money!  From experience I can tell you that slow sites are less likely to attract visitors or promote their return.

There are a number of things you can do to improve the speed of your site but the question then becomes, how do you check it?  Buy different speed modems?  No.  If you're using FrontPage 2000 the task becomes easier.

How to Estimate your site's Download time

Previous FrontPage 97 and 98 users will recall that in the bottom right corner of the FrontPage Editor you could see the number of seconds it would take a 28.8 modem to download your site.  To design sites for higher speeds you had to do some guess work.  FrontPage 2000 has added a new feature to help you do this.

When you open a page in the FrontPage Editor, the status bar still displays the estimated time it will take for that page to download at a connection speed of 28.8 kbps by default. If you're designing a site for users with higher speed connections (ex: an Intranet that's on a T1 line), you'll want to be able to design your pages for different speeds. To do this:

1. Switch to the Page view, by either selecting the Page icon in the Views bar or using the View/Page menu;

2. Click on the 0 Seconds over 28.8 (Estimated Time to Download) box in the status bar;

3. A pop-up menu will appear. Choose from the listing of other connection speeds, such as 14.4, 28.8, 56.6, ISDN, T1, and T3.

Fig 1. Checking the page download time

Now when you're designing you page you'll know how fast it will load at that speed.  When you're finished, you can choose other speeds to see the differences.

Finding your "Slow" Pages

Now that you've seen how to change the estimated download time of the current page, you can also use another FrontPage 2000 feature to check all of your "slow" pages at once.

1. Select the View, Reports, Slow Pages;

2. This displays the Slow Pages Report.

This report shows you all of your files (pages) that take longer than 30 seconds to download at a connection speed of 28.8. You can also re-define what you think is a slow page is by choosing Tools, Options. When the Options dialog box appears, choose the Reports View tab. Here, you can change the choices for "Slow Pages" take at least _ seconds to download and Assume Connection Speed of to whatever values that you want a slow page to be defined as in the Slow Pages Report.

Fig 2. Reporting slow pages

About the Author
David Berry is a Microsoft MVP for FrontPage. He runs a FrontPage support site at http://www.net-sites.com/sitebuilder