Contrary to what Internet industry wants you to believe; about 90% of Internet users are still using slow dial-up connections. Download speeds of 3k to 5k per second are not uncommon. Faster cable and DSL connections that offer up to 250k download speeds still often only download at a rate of 50k to 60k.

Ideally, a page should load in 20 seconds or less. So with a dial-up connection, that great looking 250k graphic you have on your page will take about 62 seconds to download. Then if you have other graphics it could easily take over two minutes to see page. I don't know about you, but I don't wait more than a minute for a page to load. I use a high speed cable connection to internet, and I've still gone to pages that were so graphics intensive that my browser timed out before page could load. If this happens, or people just get tired of waiting, then your site is useless because no one will ever see it.

The best thing you can do is not get carried away with graphics. Using them sparingly is easiest way to keep size of a page down, so that it will load faster. If for some reason, you need to have a lot of graphics there are two ways to make them load more quickly.