Hey guys....need a little help here, I guess I've got a website that loads.....very slooow, I've ran reports, and it looks fine to me, but getting complaints, and my bounce rate is 45%

If you could, please take the time to go through the website and let me know what areas I need to improve in. (this site contains css & javascript)

any help would be greatly appreciated.....thanks :-)

http://www.appliancezone.com

Loads fine. 7mb Down. FF 3.0.7

oh yea......well what's ur broadband speed?

I believe he just told you... 7mb downstream (download speed)

ok, thx...Madman340, did you have any problems pulling up the website?

On 8Mb here, loads in about 3 seconds.

Probably doesn't help landing on a page with very little focus on your "call to action". Lots of distracting bright shiny things but nothing that instantly says "Go here for Hoover washing machine parts"

I spent a good while hovering over the manufacturers images hoping to find a link but to no avail, then the spooky "Brent: How may I help" popup thing appeared and I gave up.

yea....thx for the help....we get so many comments on how easy our website is to navigate through and locate appliance parts & accessories....Now back on track....so it loads up fine eh?

It's about 1 second for me, I have 10mb. You do have an awful lot of graphics and little shiny things, but I thought it was quite a nice site. The flash header is a nice touch.

- Steve

I have a 10mb connection and it loaded very fast for me. I mean to be honest it seems to have good load time and I didn't really see any problems with it.

One thing I might point out is this, if you can make all your possible photos .gifs instead of jpeg because this will keep file sizes down and help improve your load times.

thx Shawn, well it was even slower a couple of weeks ago, so I lowered the quality of the images & flash file, cut out some css, converted most of my png's to gif & png8, flash file was the main prob, was 55kb, now down to 22kb....some of the images I can't set to gif cause it will throw the colors off and on the current jpgs i have now, if any of em were converted to gif, the file size would actually be larger. But our bounce rate is still really high (45%), and honestly, Im not 100% sure what that actually means.....i think i get the idea though....that customers are exiting before the site completely loads? Could y'all kinda explain what that really is...pls?

It is loading fine for me on IE8 & 5 mb DSL. You could tell a slight slow down when the products were pulled but nothing sign.

Your problem is that there are so many resources loaded, combined with the browser limiting concurrent connections to avoid hammering the servers, that it takes a lot of time to transmit everything

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=ht...om//&id=788068

But our bounce rate is still really high (45%), and honestly, Im not 100% sure what that actually means.....i think i get the idea though....that customers are exiting before the site completely loads?

Nope, though depending where in your pages the analytic system you are using actually loads, it could be a contributing factor. Which is the reason you should load any external analytics system last in the page. Between the </body> & </html> will ensure that the page is fully loaded before a page view is registered.

Bounce rate is a ratio of the number of page views and the number of page closures without the visitor performing some other action within the same site.

On some pages a high bounce rate is natural, MFA sites, Directories, Affiliate sites, Link/banner ad pages all should have a high bounce rate, hopefully by people clicking out via the ads.
On a commercial products site it can mean usability issues with the site/page, poor or ineffective promotion and marketing, issues with keyword/phrase targeting, amongst others.

Like any isolated metric, bounce rate taken on it's own means very little, you need to couple it with investigation on WHY it is high/low/"not what you would expect".
Look at the keywords used from the SE, or the referral page where the visitor came from, who then "bounced" out of the site.
If the phrase/word is a good match for the landing page, the you probably have a landing page usability issue. If it was from an unrelated word/phrase it may be simply a referrer spam attempt, or poor targeting of your link building.
But without more details it's impossible to be precise.

ah.... well said. I appreciate you taking the time to explain that
chrishirst.

tripy, too many resources being loaded....well there are approx: 50 images on each page that are hardcoded in the html, and my css has a lot of img sources. guess that's part of the prob....50imgs is kinda high...the js is good, but the css plays a big role in the loading time. y'all, I really appreciate you goin through the site and investigating the loading issues, I'll look into these issues a little more and have the loading issue resolved....thanks again :-)

Your bounce rate tells the percentage of people who exit your page without going to another page.

This is a huge problem with alot of websites, and to be honest there are a couple problems for this which i will list below:

Cluttered Website
Duplicate Images
Non professional look
CONTENT (This is the biggest)

As I said content, this is actually the biggest factor, if people don't like what they read on the first page then why will they go to check out other pages? You need to make sure your content is something that excites readers and makes them want to continue to look through your site, give them something that noone else gives them.

it loads fast to my browser...