You have four seconds. Use it wisely!
Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before abandoning the site. Shopper’s loyalty is contingent on quick page loads and brand perception. If you don’t have those, there is an almost certainty that they will click out of your site and you will lose the sale.
I would like to point out that this research has been done for retail websites, or online stores, but blogs and corporate presence sites are no different. You are still selling yourself, your company, your idea. You want a visitor to spend time on your site and get to know you or your company. More importantly, you want them to come back!
Why do you think corporate blogs have become so popular? It is a more personalized corporate presence. You get to know the company in terms of the people that make it up! And you get to sell your product in the process.
Admittedly, people are a little less critical if there is no monetary exchange, but the same principle still applies. You have four seconds to get the page loaded and maybe three to five more for the user to find something that is familiar. Whether that is a logo, a term they were searching for or whatever else.
It is up to you to make make sure they don’t click out!
Ref: 4 seconds research, John Chow
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I can see how it can be challenging to design sites that balance load time and presentation. I am curious if there are many people that still consider the folks on dial up.
I wonder, if there is a way to figure out how many people visit our sites using dial up compared to some kind of high speed access?
It is entertaining to read this article, because last night my ISP, Charter Communications, had a planned outage which started at midnight.
That totally sucked for me, because midnight is my rush hour… I usually work a lot at night, typically till 3 or even 4 am. waking up again in just a few hours.
Last night was a very busy night for me, and using dial up was horrible!
So, after experiencing that… I really want to know what percentage of total visitors access my site using dial up… if it is a high percent, then I need to make some changes… more less, the AdSense image only code… those took forever to load!
Great points Garry. I use satellite at my house and the office has tremendous bandwidth, but I know just from consulting for different startups and such, dial up is becoming less of a concern. It is unfortunate really, because there is so much great content that is only optimized for high speed.
I want to say the last statistic I saw was 52% of internet users are on high speed, but I could be wrong.
I know when I had dial up at my house, there were websites that I just couldn’t access because of the bandwidth requirements. Dial up users are typically more forgiving of load up speeds, I think though. It would be interesting to see that report dimensioned in a way that showed the difference between dial up and broadband..