Don’t Blow Your Load Times

As a website developer there are many things we think of when designing a site.  We want it to be nice looking, user friendly, full of good content, and optimized for revenue generation.  There actually needs to be one thing that moves in front of those two, load time.  All data points to the following.  Users are not patient.  They will not wait for more than four seconds and will simply leave if they deem a site too slow.  In today’s era of fast connection speeds, their patience is less and less.

Here’s what Google found

The Effects of Slow Download Times

Even small changes in response times can have significant effects. Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006). When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006). Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007). Experiments at Microsoft on Live Search showed that when search results pages were slowed by 1 second: (Kohavi 2007)

• Queries per user declined by 1.0%, and
• Ad clicks per user declined by 1.5%

After slowing the search results page by 2 seconds:

• Queries per user declined by 2.5%, and
• Ad clicks per user declined by 4.4%

As a former owner of a site that took forever to load (this one) I realized the value of solid hosting.  I’m not saying a fast site will pay for the more expensive hosting but I can guarantee that poor hosting and slow load times will turn away users and revenue.

Here is a test I did to see how some of the top domain sites load. I threw mine in there for fun.

1	domaining.com	73.41 KB	4.07 seconds	0.06 seconds
2	namebee.com	76.67 KB	1.49 seconds	0.02 seconds
3	elliotsblog.com	52.59 KB	0.07 seconds	0 seconds
4	fragerfactor.blogspot.com	201.26 KB	0.26 seconds	0 seconds
5	thedomains.com	59.37 KB	1.5 seconds	0.03 seconds
6	domainshane.com	66.68 KB	1.6 seconds	0.02 seconds
7	domainnamewire.com	51.7 KB	0.81 seconds	0.02 seconds
8	morganlinton.com	42.4 KB	0.73 seconds	0.02 seconds
9	domaingang.com	44.35 KB	1.28 seconds	0.03 seconds
10	sullysblog.com	39.48 KB	2.29 seconds	0.06 seconds