Waiting times

Website speed matters. Waiting times matter. Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, even higher search rankings. If you’re after mobile traffic (everyone is), site speed becomes even more important. No one wants to download a 4MB website on their smartphone, but most sites are that way. Your website can be different.

While one-second load time would be nice, if you manage to get a load time under three seconds, you’re doing fine. If it’s under seven seconds, it’s okay too (but you have to try to improve it). Over 10 seconds and you’re losing money in noticeable quantities.

So how fast should your site be? While Jakob Nielsen says people can handle up to 10 second load time, consider this:

• Some 45% of people are less likely to make a purchase when an ecommerce site loads slower than expected.
• Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%.
• According to this scientific study, tolerable waiting time for information retrieval is approximately two seconds. Adding feedback, like a progress bar, can push tolerable waiting time to 38 seconds (so if your site is slow, add progress bars or equivalent).
• A one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%.
• 8% of people cite slow loading pages as a key reason for abandoning their purchase.

Continue reading: Increasing Website Speed (and Conversions)