Who else hates slow sites?
Monday November 27, 2006
I'm often asked how slow is too slow for a page to download. And if I provide times (4 seconds, 7 seconds, 10 seconds) someone invariably responds with a comment along the lines of "my page loads slower than that, but we do fine".
My rule of thumb is to build pages that load within 7 seconds on a 56K modem, 10 seconds being the maximum load time. Gardner research found that 4 seconds was the longest many people would wait for an ecommerce site to load. But what about the most popular pages on the Internet? Stuart Brown did an experiment:
Victims of Their Own Success where he evaluated the top 100 sites for page size, load times, and transfer rates. Faster pages seem to be more popular. Even About.com is in there - our home page is too slow. :(
Speed Up Your Pages
Comments
Who doesn’t hate sites that have a slow download time, but waiting longer that 4 seconds is crazy. It depends on the content of the page along with the type of internet connection that the person has. We all know that or should.
For me, when I design a site, I do take speed into consideration, but you have to remember that the reason why the site is there in the first place is the content.
I think what’s really frustrating in terms of load times is when a site is flash-based and there’s no html option for it. Sure, Flash is nice, but I still remember the horrid loading time of it on 56k, and even after getting xDSL, that “traumatising loading time” still affects me.