Not only do slow loading times make people less likely to visit your site --and revisit your site-- but a few months back Google officially announced that slow load times will reduce how your site will rank in the Google search engine for whatever keywords that page happens to be optimized for.
Murray
[URL=“http://www.discountdental4u.net”]
Glad to see you took the time to read the links i gave you 
Yes! and if you are trying to reach typographers, they probably have that ‘best font since sliced bread that real typographers know about’ font, so @font-face is extra work for nothing. The other people roughly don’t care…
And if you are doing a special font to have extra curly brackets, quotes, or a whoop-dee-do (those silly symbols in wingdings that look pretty), you are better off just making a image of it and just slap that in (with a null alt attribute).
Right, but how much slower?
On a recent project, I used a nice chunk type font - one that I thought looked way better than tired old Impact or Arial Black, to improve my headings. The bandwidth hit? 15 - 35KB, depending on the format served (which depends on the browser). Taking the average of those figures, 25KB is about the size of a small JPEG image, and equates to very little additional load time on broadband. Plus, the font file is cached - once they download it, they never need to get it again.
I am not going to lose any sleep over that.
Now, if you include bold, italic, and bold-italic versions of the chosen font, you could triple or quadruple the load - assuming all those styles were used on the entry page - which would give any bandwidth dietician cause for pause I’m sure. For headings, however, which is where special fonts are really needed most IMHO, one style will generally suffice.
Well tests have shown that about 50% of visitors leave if your page hasn’t grabbed their attention by the time the first 80k of content has downloaded. If your page contains much other than plain text it is already likely to be close to that if not a lot bigger before you go adding the font.
An extra 15k to download at the start (particularly in a page that is already so big that you consider that amount of extra download to be insignificant) may be just enough to drive the few visitors you might have had left to leave the page before it finishes loading leaving you with almost no one to see the actual loaded page.
If you need to use specific fonts you are far better off serving the content in PDF rather than HTML format since then you can embed just those specific characters from the font that you are actually using and know that everyone will see it in that font. That will give your visitors a far smaller download and gives you far greater control of how the page looks.
That’s very interesting. With the variation in people’s Internet speeds, I wonder how they can measure it by size instead of time? Would you happen to have a link to the source of this data? I’d like to read more.
There’s a reason my ‘target size’ for a single page on a site is 70k, and the upper limit I allow is 140k… and why I laugh at the nimrods running around with one to three megabyte pages. Enjoy the high bounce rate!
Some pages are pretty absurd, all right. I laugh at Flash sites which sit there “loading” for five minutes - not everybody has a dedicated 10Meg fiber connection after all. 
Some interesting statistics, however, that I collected tonight using Yahoo’s ySlow, follow.
sitepoint.com - 371.4 KB
cnn.com - 1081.3 KB
politico.com - 388.4 KB
ebay.com - 207.5 KB
joomla.org - 248.9 KB
microsoft.com - 257.5 KB
The site of mine to which I referred weighs in at 245.9 KB.
I’m not losing any sleep.
Ideally all web pages should load in under a second - any longer response has always been considered too slow. Unfortunately about 99.99% of web users have internet connections that are too slow to make this practical and so they have all got used to having to wait longer than a second for pages to load. Those on faster connections still expect pages to load faster than those on slower connections do (if you move to a connection that is four times as fast you’ll expect that pages should load four times as fast).
So while 50% of people on dialup will wait up to 30 seconds those on much faster connections will not be prepared to wait anywhere near that long since they are paying for a faster connection speed in order that pages will load faster.
Once everyone around the world is on 1Gb+ connection speeds then we will be able to start considering making web pages bigger without risking losing people who think the page loads too slow.
That’s why there are font stacks, though. While the font is loading, IF it takes longer than a second, users can still read the text with one of the other fonts. At least that’s my opinion.
Did you know 97.3695% of all statistics are made up?! 
His percentages probably aren’t too far off buddy ;).
Just trying to lighten the mood a bit 
I normally agree with you on most things, but this I have to disagree. I feel people are more likely to leave your site if you direct them to PDF content. I know I always do.
On a recent project, I used a nice chunk type font - one that I thought looked way better than tired old Impact or Arial Black, to improve my headings. The bandwidth hit? 15 - 35KB, depending on the format served (which depends on the browser). Taking the average of those figures, 25KB is about the size of a small JPEG image, and equates to very little additional load time on broadband. Plus, the font file is cached - once they download it, they never need to get it again.
File size is not the only issue here, there is a reason CMS’s tend to be slower than static pages. It has to do with the communication to the server, which is only going to add to it if you used @font-face.
I feel that unless it’s a heading, it would probably not be worth considering @font-face. I would be interested to know how this works. Once it downloads the font is this it? or does it keep re-downloading it on different pages. If it’s only the single time you might be able to use a fancy heading. For main body text however I think Arial would be sufficient. Anything else would be pushing the boat out a little.
Depends, are they New England born and bred yankees, or SoCal millivegan… I won’t use the word?
Literally I was going to post “lemme guess, Southern California?” – but apparently I wasn’t that far off the mark since you’re in Arizona. How little difference 300 miles or less makes.
If I’m curt with you it’s because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this. So, pretty please… with sugar on top. Clean the **** car. – Winston Wolfe, Pulp Fiction
No? How about…
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
I know, even better…
[i]When asked by his nephew about his profanity, Patton remarked, “When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can’t run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight it’s way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.”
“As for the types of comments I make”, he continued with a wry smile, “Sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence.”[/i]
Basically, we come from two radically different worlds of doing things – as the joke goes the Americans and British are two people’s separated by a common language. I would extend that to Americans are five people’s separated by a common language.
… since the correct answer to every question is “Ya cahnt geht theyah frum heeya”
The above reaction is entirely based on that my posts in this thread are absurdly polite compared to what I’m used to dealing with when it comes to doing business. Every time I deal with people from outside New England all I can think is “Haven’t you people ever held jobs?!?”… then I remember the twig-blonde SoCal secretary who left the office screaming “You can’t treat people like this” at the boss and we all stood their flabbergasted going “like what?”
Regionalisms, gotta love it! 
I assume you’re referring to “more HTTP requests” vs “greater file size”. If so, why would you say that a CMS would tend to produce more of the former? CMS’s are pretty much a server-side thing; in some cases - notably with transparent CMS’s such as my favorite, MODx - the final content served to the browser is indistinguishible from “static” content.
I would be interested to know how this works. Once it downloads the font is this it? or does it keep re-downloading it on different pages.
I am almost 100% sure that the file gets cached (though at the moment I can’t lay my hands on any documentation to that effect) - it’s just like a background image or any other resource in CSS.
It would have to d/load the file from the server. It’s not going to just about the file size, but also about it being a separate file that needs to be pulled from somewhere. It’s rendered on the client’s machine it would have to be downloaded on their computer or their browser (not sure about this one). I am not really equipped to give a constructive arguments here, wish I was, but the truth is I ain’t.
I just tested it out and it was noticeably slower on my computer. Initially I thought something was wrong with the page until it decided to dump all the text at once which was quite an different way of having text load on my web-pages.
To my knowledge, it caches, but doesn’t install… so if you clear your cache…
I am assuming headings here mean the h1-h6 elements, how much do they really need to be different?
@sega
It sounds like you are just talking about the additional load-time hit of having an extra file to grab (the font). This is quite true, but no more true of a font file than an extra JPEG image of fairly small size.
I just checked the load time of my site against sitepoint.com using http://www.webwait.com: Sitepoint loaded in 9.57 seconds; my site, 4.79 seconds. Now of course this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison; however, it shows that my site has a reasonably short load time by any standard.
I don’t know very many users who would have the first idea how to clear their cache, or even what it is. I think the few who make a habit of it should be used to somewhat longer load times everywhere.
I am assuming headings here mean the h1-h6 elements, how much do they really need to be different?
Of course that’s pretty much up to each designer’s opinion. However, I think heading text presented in dull old Arial or TNR is just, well… dull. Special fonts really shine in headings because they’re big enough to see. When you get down to the usual size of h4-h6, it probably doesn’t make any difference.
my old work place did it automatically…
That’s true, I suppose there are a number of work situations where cache gets automatically cleared by policy. Still, though, users stuck on a network like that are going to have bigger problems, like having to re-download the 25.59 KB Google logo every morning (:…