Poll: How slow is too slow for a page to download?
Thursday August 10, 2006
Jennifer's Web Design / HTML Blog
By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com Guide to Web Design / HTML since 1997
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Comments
On what kind of a connection and what kind of a site? Dial-up or broadband? News site or image sharing site? Important considerations I think since we all want sites to load quickly - that’s a given. But we’re always willing to wait if it’s something we’re really after.
I think an hour would be too slow
Willing to wait for something, and thinking that it is too slow are two different things. However, I agree in such, that I think maybe the question should have referred to something more general, ex: a website’s home page.
The survey is too simplistic, how long am i willing to wait for general information that is not key to my current task is a very different question than how long am i willing to wait for confirmation of my credit card transaction.
The time is always related to the value of the information and how easy it is to get that info again.
E.g. I won’t necessarily wait for a credit card transaction confirmation page, if the email confirmation hits my gmail account before the web page has responded.
If i am just reading news headlines on the BBC site, which I can pretty much get from the Sky News, then i will try the other one if one is slow.
The point from a web developer’s view is that it needs to be as fast as your competitor’s unless you have some unique content that can’t be found elsewhere
Good idea for a poll Jennifer
. Having been around the web for a decade and BBS’s before that, I’ve noticed that as we’ve had breakthroughs in connection speeds, some webmasters/designers have had the tendency to suck up the advantage by bogging down pages further; making pages that were slow to load on dialup equally as slow via broadband - without any real benefits except for some eye candy that really serves no purpose. It’s also often forgotten that there’s still a sizeable chunk of the population, even in the USA, on dialup.
If it’s the opening page to a website, 5 seconds is too slow.
Designers who load a massive Flash file onto the home page and expect visitors to sit watching a progreess bar for thirty seconds before a sexy intro movie downloads are not living in the real world. The tell tale evidence is the “Skip Intro” button placed discretely somewhere.
Have you ever navigated away from a site that opens too slowly, never to return? I know I have.
Your results are saying that 45% of reader say that 5 seconds is too slow but only 7% consider 30 seconds too slow. Surely it’s the other way around
Sorry, I did not know I was entring a poll, I just clicked on the link at the top of the list of times expecting to see a different page to the pages on the other links.
Does that help you validate the results of your poll?
I think a more accurate picture might be gotten if the question was “How slow is too slow for a page to START to downolad?”
If a page that I want to look at will start to download in 5 seconds, I might wait for the rest of it, provided it’s not a ‘clever’ flash splash. I think it’s important to get some text content up there FAST to hold the visitor while the rest of the site loads up.
I think speed is a perception. I don’t need my entire page to download but enought of it so that I can get started.. A well built page should be accessible for interaction within a few seconds. The rest of the page can download while not holding me back from starting to use the page…
The answer is “it depends.” I know it sounds cliched, but it’s true. It depends on the things others have mentioned above, like connection speed, type of page or website, and perceived download start time. But it also depends upon the value that the website or web application provides to the customer. If there is high value and nowhere else to go to get the information or service, then customers will wait longer. If it is a commodity website, then customers will have less patience because they know they can go elsewhere.
If you want a useful survey, then you need to ask how slow is too slow for a customer support site to load? Or a town information website, or a specialized boutique ecommerce site, or something else equally specific.
Also didnt realise at first this was a poll - I thought it was a series of articles giving advice. I just stopped short of clicking 5secs. Perhaps this explains the (unexpectedly?) high percentage giving this answer?
I dont like this poll.. It should be separated between different connection types. Wheres the actual article itself? Please dont send me mails that are meaningless. Thanks! Is this some sort of new spam marketing scheme?
Actually, the newsletter was sent out as it was (with the poll a second time) by mistake. Basically I was writing all day, went to work out and got really tired, came home and fell asleep rather than updating the newsletter. Sorry about that.
– Jennifer
Of late the biggest problem I’ve run into are web designers who don’t know that on the internet uploading an image at full pixel and byte size is totally unnecessary. Simple optimizing an image for the web doesn’t take away the clarity just the size. An unoptimized image file might take 30 seconds to download with a dial up connection, optimized it might take 10 seconds.
Was not able to participate in the “poll.” Get real people. This is obviously not a statistical survey. Just an informal “what do you think.” Personally, if I have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load, I begin wondering what they are lining up at my computer and start thinking about heading for home and then starting over. Sometimes it is worth waiting a bit, but not more than a minute or two. If they are that slow, the rest of the site isn’t usually any better.
Entry pages should load lightning fast. But I make tutorials that are Flash demonstrations and they load like lead balloons - which is an inescapable problem. If I give a visitor a good idea of what is contained in a lead page, they’ll wait. If I don’t, I lost a reader.
So it depends is the best answer one can give. My homepage provides a fair example - the page is driven by a series of javascripts to populate it with fresh current information but it is the door to my blog which provides a table of content as it were to longer downloading tutorial which many seek for detail specific solutions for newbies. Please NO deep links to the big files!
This is not a sales proposal, but, anybody that uses the Merlin S620 Novatelwireless Aircard from Sprint PCS is aware it is as fast as a T1 connection, and pages load in nanoseconds, when you are near a data enriched cell tower. Thought I’d bring that point up.
If 5 seconds is too slow, then about.com needs to seriously rework its own website. This poll took 15 seconds to load over my cable modem connection.
The question “How slow is too slow?” seems pretty meaningless. It seems unrealistic to expect a majority of pages to load in 5 seconds for every user across the world. Server loads, network traffic, connection speed, and distance from server all add up to enormous variability in page load times.
Perhaps, a better question might be, “When designing your web pages, what do you consider acceptable page load times?”
I’m glad you asked that question! Although, I agree with the comments that the question could have been more specific and better structured, I really enjoyed reading the dialogue in response. I learned some things from these different view points.
I did not click any of the buttons since I know there are times I will wait a few minutes if it is really something I want to see or I really need some information off a site to complete a transaction, as agonizing as the wait may be.
I still don’t understand how some of the largest companies or biggest entertainers can have web sites that are excruciating slow to navigate throughout their sites. Successful business people know the value of time and will say “timing is everything” and “time is money”, but when I experience extremely slow download speeds and/or difficult navigation, I wonder how many potential customers have said “this is a waste of my time” and left the site and is now the customer of a competitor? If you have two stores with the same or similar products, same costs, quantity, and quality, but one store has sales clerks that respond quickly and the other store has sales clerks that don’t acknowledge you for several minutes even though they seem to be available, then which store will you frequent?
I am a amature webmaster..I created my web site with notepad. And it was very slow to open..I hated to go to my own site..LOL..I found a few online free html courses and took them now my home page looks and loads faster..The rest of my site loads slow because of the graphics on them…
But i agree with everyone if a site takes to long to load i will leave and go somewhere else… I really can’t stand flash sites….