Ask The Expert: Email Load Times

The latest Ask The Expert question is about email load time:

What do you think is the optimal for image loading time in an email?

It’s hard to pin down the ‘optimum’ load time for an email; to truly define this number would require a fair amount of research into your recipient list. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go off some good rules of thumb. For a long time people went by a rule that 8 seconds was acceptable, and more recently 4 seconds has been thrown out there, but all these numbers are mired in controversy.

Faster Is Better

So let’s simplify things: faster is better. I’m going to give you some unscientific numbers that are easy to remember and just as good as much of the other data out there.

• 8 seconds or more - Too slow, you need to address this
• Around 4 seconds - Doing good, but it could be better
• Under 1 second - You are sitting pretty

If you aren’t happy with your current load times then let’s look at some easy things you can do to get that number down.

Always Looking

The first thing you should focus on is a good text to image balance. This means that your email is not solely comprised of images, you want to have text on the page to counter act the images you show. Providing alt tags for all your images is also a huge help here as well. The goal with both of these tactics is to provide something that is shown even when the images aren’t there yet.

As you can see in the example here (to the right), only some of the images have loaded, but I already have some idea of what I’ll be seeing. The descriptions can hold my attention until the images are there.

Watch Your Weight

Making those images load faster is next, I’d rather not have to see the Alt tags. You can use any number of desktop applications (e.g. photoshop, preview on a mac, even MS Paint) to scale an image down. You want to resize your images so that the final size for an image isn’t too large:

• Small images should be around 10K
• Larger images should weigh in between 40K and 80K

Again, these are rough estimates, this isn’t an exact science.

If you slice up your email into multiple smaller images it will often download faster (or at least seem to!) and display more smoothly as the images load, rather than waiting for one big image to load. Many commercial email building tools, such as DreamWeaver, can be very helpful here.

Be A Good Host

One last thing you can do to help speed load times is to host your images on fast servers that are near the end user. The last you want is for your images to be slowed down by an overloaded server. To solve this you should use a geographical distribution system like Akamai.

Here at Bronto, we host all images that you upload via Akamai. This ensures that your images are loaded from a server that is near the person requesting the file, and that it loads as fast possible.

So just remember, a good email provides a good balance of text and judiciously sized images. If you couple that with good hosting, your email will load in two shakes of lamb’s tail - which, I think, is pretty close to optimal.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto

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Tagged as: alt tags, load times