Differ in Load Time — Parked Pages

Load times for parked domain names differ greatly.

Most visitors to parked domain names hit the back button on their browser rather than clicking on a link. One way to ensure that visitors click the back button more often is to have parked pages that load very slowly. How many times have you visited a web site and clicked back since it took forever to load?

I tested out the domain parking firms today to see how fast their parked pages load. I used a free tool at Pingdom to calculate load times for three different landing pages at 7 parking firms. I threw out the longest and shortest loading page for each service and have noted the middle one below.

Ahead of viewing the load times, a caveat. Actually, many:

1. Some pages appear to have loaded to the end user even though additional items are still loading (such as stats trackers). So even if a page takes a few seconds to load, the end user may have seen it load in less than a second.

2. Network traffic and proximity to Pingdom’s test servers may matter. In other words, there are a lot of variables outside the parking firm’s control.

3. Almost all of the firms loaded very quickly. Just since a parked page took longer to load than a competitor doesn’t mean it’s materially different.

4. Parking firms offer multiple landers, some of which load faster than others. I didn’t test all landers.

There are a number of ways firms can make their parked pages load faster. Good coding, compressed images, and proper CSS usage matter. Here are some other factors.

With that in mind (and I know people will bring up other fallacies in the testing methodology), here’s how the services performed:

Sedo – 1.1 seconds. Sedo has fairly straightforward designs that are light on graphics. They have lots of text with their one-click landers but the absence of sizable graphics keeps load time down.

Parked.com – 1.9 seconds. I assumed Parked would be slower given its sizable graphic on each landing page, but they’ve done a good job compressing the graphics.

DomainSponsor – 1.9 seconds. DomainSponsor’s landers are “googleesque” without pictures.

WhyPark – 1.9 seconds. WhyPark is coming out with a fresh version that ought to load even faster. But nothing to complain regarding here.

TrafficZ – 3.0 seconds. TrafficZ’s landers have multiple graphic files. One of the landers I ran had a file size of 136.4kb.

Dotzup – 3.0 seconds. Some of the landers are heavy on graphics.

EvoLanding – 5.8 seconds. This didn’t surprise me. EvoLanding’s pages take a long time to load, likely since the system auto-generates pages from multiple sources on the fly.