One of the most common mistakes I find when speaking to newbie affiliates (yeah, I class myself as intermediate now ) is that they don’t even check their page load times. Why are they so important? Well remember you are dealing with humans here and if you were browsing the internet the very last thing you want to do is wait for the page to load up.

More to the point, depending on the niche your page load time could be the difference from a successful campaign and one that will cost you loads of time and money. For example, if you were targeting a debt relief program you could assume that a large majority of the people looking in that area will have 56k connection speed. If your landing page is full of large colourful images it would take days to load up so they will just hit the back button – that means you’ve been charged for the click and no chance of them going through to the offer page and completing it (no revenue).

There are a number of tools which you can use to identify your load time and whether it’s good, acceptable or poor. This tool will allow you to stick your URL in and it will analyze everything from object size totals, page objects and the important one – download times.

This is the table you are looking for, it will display the download times for various speeds of internet so you will be able to make a decision if action is needed to improve them.

Another great tool which I use is from Dave over at PPC Fool. This will help you identify whether you need to focus on your load time or not, once you put in your URL you will be presented with one of these messages.

Just remember that the next time you set up a landing page, you need to see if you are being penalized for the load time.

Be sure to check back tomorrow because I will talk about how you can reduce load times, you will kick yourself when you find out how easy & simple it actually is.

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