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 because it took forever to load?

I tested out the domain parking companies 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 companies. I threw out the longest and shortest loading page for each service and have reported the middle one below.

Before 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 company’s control.

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

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

There are several ways companies 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 large graphics keeps load time down.

Parked.com – 1.9 seconds. I assumed Parked would be slower given its large 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 new version that should load even faster. But nothing to complain about 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 because the system auto-generates pages from multiple sources on the fly.