I have playing around with a few things and I have been visiting a lot of sites lately. Some of the sites I have visited were noticeably slow loading. More like extremely slow!! Yes extremely slow...and yes I do have a decent high speed connection.
Not only did these sites like to put a ton of images on a page, it seems that they do not know how to re-size pictures. I would guess that they are using their nice convenient digital camera, you know the one that is 8 to 10 mega pixels that for some reason they think they really need to set that high. Maybe they like pictures that are poster size or something.
So to continue, I am guessing people are uploading that huge 8 to 10 mega pixels sized picture to there hosting account or one of them free image hosts. Then, when they post something they insert the address to this huge picture that is 2 to 3 Mb's in size or more. Add about 5 to 20 of these on a page and it is apparent why these pages are taking so darn long to load.
So please remember to re-size before uploading and linking them. You can turn that 2 or 3 mb picture into 50-150 kb's without any noticeable image quality loss. This will not only make a page load so much faster, it will also save you some bandwidth/transfer with your host.
This isn't everywhere or every site, it just seems like lately I've noticed it more than usual. Maybe I am just hitting the wrong sites, or having bad luck.
If your page is taking more than 10-12 seconds to load, give or take a little...but not much...People aren't going to sit and wait. They move on as quickly as they got there, and they don't come back.
I thought I would just mention this as a sort of friendly reminder.