Loading Times Can Send You Mad
Posted On: 2011-05-09
Well maybe lots of other things can contribute to your insanity but there's no doubt that if you design websites with a view to making money from them then the time it takes for your websites to load is going to help you go crazy.
There was a time when everyone was on dial-up and people were fairly patient as a website loaded. Of course even back in the dial-up days there were some webmasters and designers who never seemed to grasp the importance of using small file-sizes in their graphics and images and people didn't stick around while those sites slowly filtered onto their monitors.
However most people were patient and waiting 30 seconds for a page to load was no big deal. We were used to it ... we expected it ... and designers worked to build sites that looked good and loaded in a reasonable time.
Then along came DSL and the high-speed Internet was born. Even those old and ultra-slow websites began to load a lot quicker and optimized sites loaded at speeds that were almost breathtaking compared to what we were used to.
And for web designers that was when it all began to fall apart. Suddenly we had high-speed Internet and we could load our sites up with big graphics and big images and that's what the public wanted. They wanted to see lots of color and lots of big images because things loaded quickly.
Of course we responded but there was a problem ... during that change-over period between the old dial-up compatible sites and the new big file-sized sites people began to expect that every site would load fast. The patience with 30 second load times was gone.
Now people expected big files AND they expected fast loading and they weren't prepared to wait while a site took forever to appear on their monitors.
Even Google decided that it wanted to get in on the act and recommend sites that loaded quickly rather than sites that would annoy surfers with their slow loading times. Suddenly Google was including loading times as part of their algorithm ... not a big part ... but it was there and web designers were on notice.
But hey ... we're a resourceful lot and if Google wanted fast loading times that might have been as fast as three seconds then we could deliver! Of course there were, and are, a lot of webmasters out there who haven't yet read the memo but who cares about them ... three seconds? We can do it!
So if you can do it in three seconds are you feeling pretty confident? Are you feeling smug about the fact that your sites are going to do it better than so many other webmasters' sites?
Well maybe you had better think again because it seems that a three second loading time is so yesterday. While we've all been stressing about fast loading times and thinking that we've nailed it and people aren't using the back button to escape from our sites the surfers have changed the game yet again.
Yesterday it was three seconds ... the time that it took for a page to start loading or surfers would start leaving. Today it's two seconds and you can have all the bells and whistles and smart functionality you like ... surfers aren't going to wait around for it all to load.
If it's not happening in two seconds then they're starting to leave and go looking for what they want on some other webmaster's site.
But wait ... there's more news on loading times and it just doesn't get any better. In a recent survey 56 per cent of those surveyed said that they expected that load times on the mobile device would be a bit slower than on their desktop or almost as fast as the load time on their desktop.
However 21 per cent said that they expected the load times on their phones to be about equal with the load times on their desktop and 12 per cent of those surveyed said that they expected the load times on their mobile devices to be FASTER than on their desktop.
So on their desktop they're starting to leave after two seconds if a site isn't beginning to load but they're expecting the loading time for websites to be even faster on their mobile device.
See what I mean about loading time as a contributing factor in the insanity levels in webmasters? How quickly are your websites loading these days?