Hello Ganesh,
I just created a pre-loader for our site, but the primary developer doesn't want to use it. We'll see...
Our site performance is bad, but he tells me it will get better once the site goes live and has more users. I remain skeptical, so I created a pre-loader which I call a "Splash" page. I'll tell you what it contains in a moment...
I'd love to hear comments from others on performance of their site. Ours is a church site- a small church in a poor neighborhood, with an average age of 55. Most of the users will be infrequent users with less than average computer skills and knowledge. We need our pages to take less than 8-10 seconds per page. Our test pages sometimes take 30-40 seconds (if I haven't been to the test site recently), or it can take as little as 5 seconds if I have already visited the page today- as a result of caching. The main developer says he usually sees his pages in only a few seconds.
Our current home page requires about 250,000 bytes, and 65 files (even though there is only about 15,000 bytes of actual content (7,000 of text and 8,000 of graphics). Of course, caching minimizes the amount of downloading on a second visit, but many of our users will be turned off by their first visit if it takes 30 seconds.
Anyhow, I created a simple HTML and JS "Splash" page to "keep visitors occupied", and to begin to download some of the main page content in the background.
The Splash page has the following content:
1- a nice graphic, a small amount of text, plus "Loading" is blinking
2- in the HEAD of the HTML, I load all of the JS files that are static content of the site. This loads about 100,000 bytes.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/dnncore.js"></script> <!-- this is one of the JS files I preload -->
I also load the following files with similar statements
jquery.min.js, dnncore.js, dnn.js, dnn.xml.js, dnn.xmlhttp.js, initWidgets.js
3- at the very end of the file, I have a small SCRIPT which loads the intended HOME page.
<SCRIPT language="JavaScript"><!--
window.location="http://www.aa-mytestsite-aa.com/Home.aspx";
//--></SCRIPT>
When I use this Splash page, I have 1 of 2 different results:
- If I have already been to the test page today, the Splash page takes just a brief moment, and then the Home.aspx page opens in about 5-10 seconds.
- If I have not been to the test page today, the Splash page takes as long as 10-15 seconds, and then the Home.aspx page opens in about 10-20 seconds more.
It's still imperfect, but it does make the site seem quicker. Unfortunately, the primary developer doesn't want to use it because it is not standard content, and he expects the site's response time to be more than satisfactory when the site is done and in daily use.