Acceptable Site-Loading Times

by Anthony on November 9, 2006

Site loading time is a hot issue among web developers. Most traditionalists hold with 10 seconds before visitors start dropping off at a rapid rate.

With the exploding growth of broadband users, load-time is often discounted now. “Oh, who cares if our homepage is 600kb – our visitors have faster connections nowadays!”. Well sure folks, your visitors have faster connections now, and they’re getting used to it. They have less patience now than the good ol’ days of dial-up. They’re used to sites loading faster now, so if yours doesn’t make the grade, you’re in trouble.

Akamai and Jupiter Research have released a new study saying that online shoppers will wait a mere 4 seconds now before abandoning your site. More people these days shop online and want to use the coupons from PromoCodeWatch, but since the sites where they want to shop won’t load they can’t use them.

Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site. This is one of several key findings revealed in a report made available today by Akamai 4k Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), commissioned through JupiterResearch, that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience.

The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

In the interest of full disclosure, it appears that Akamai provide content-delivery services (to the likes of Apple and IBM), so this report is definitely in the favor. Experts like Triple Agent Media SEO can help. Whether its biased or not, who knows, but the findings make a lot of sense to me. I know I get frustrated with sites that take more than 2 seconds before I can start reading the content while the images load.

The same site loading speed is also expected for sites that let you engage in legitimate trading programs. This Crypto Code review offers ample information about what constitutes a trusted, fully operational binary options trading tool.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: