The Need for Speed
Posted On: 2009-06-25
It's a rather foggy morning here this morning but I'm sure it's going to turn into a fine sunny day. In fact, I can almost guarantee it because I'm facing a day of reports and meetings and that means I'll be tied to the office all day.
So there goes another great day that I'll miss and now they're forecasting a wet weekend. I just might be getting a lot more computer time this weekend than I had planned on.
Something I said last time
In my previous column I talked about high volume keywords and phrases and where to find them. One of the tools that I mentioned I use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I mentioned that it was good for some adult terms but declined to give results for other more hardcore terms and now I have to tell you that I was wrong.
If you follow the URL I gave you last time you will see that there's link that says 'Filter my results'; click on that link and an option appears that allows you to turn the adult filter off. It seems to be on by default although it certainly doesn't stop users from searching for data on some adult related terms.
Now let's talk about speed
If you've been around the industry for a while you will already know how important it is to design your pages with loading times in mind. If you're new to the industry then I have to tell you that the speed your page downloads to a surfer's computer is critical. If the page doesn't load quickly then surfers are hitting that back button to head over to one of your competitor's sites that does load quickly.
Just how quickly a site needs to load has been a matter of some conjecture but three seconds seems to be a reasonable figure. If your site hasn't loaded ... or loaded enough to engage the surfer in three seconds ... then you start to bleed traffic at an alarming rate.
Back in the days of dialup connections that need for speed meant that most of us would reduce the file size of every image that went into our sites and the physical size of images was kept way down. Then along came broadband and we began to care a little less about load times.
File sizes got bigger and image sizes grew too because we didn't have to worry about download speed anymore ... you could get a heck of a lot more downloaded in three seconds now that everyone was on broadband couldn't you? But of course not everyone was on broadband but that didn't stop some heroic ... or totally dumb ... webmasters declaring that they had given up on dialup and were only designing with broadband users in mind.
Broadband was taking over ... broadband was the way of the future ... broadband was where the money was and people on dialup didn't have money to spend on adult products anyway and yada yada yada . And that was the thinking a few years ago now so how much more delusional can it be now?
Yes, I know what some people are thinking ... that was some years ago so now even more people must be on broadband. More people may be on broadband now than back then but that doesn't mean that there still isn't a heck of a lot of people on dialup. A recent study revealed that something like 38% of people in the United States who surf the Web do so on dialup.
Just let me say that again for added emphasis ... as much as 38% of surfers who want to see what you're selling are stuck on dialup ... so how fast are your pages loading and what does all that lost traffic mean for you in dollar terms?
Well I'm not sure that anyone has released any figures on what the loss of traffic from a slow-loading page means in dollar terms but Google has some interesting statistics on how a slow-loading page impacts on the number of people who actually wait to see a web page.
We're all familiar with a Google search results page ... the basic page lists 10 results. Google has experimented with results pages that display more than 10 results but they've stuck with just 10 for one very good reason. More results take longer to load and people aren't prepared to stick around and wait even for a Google results page to load.
Google found that by adding an extra 10 or 20 results to a page the load time was increased by 0.4 to 0.9 of a second. On pages that had 30 results the drop in traffic was as much as 25%.
Can you afford to give away that much traffic to the back button? I know I certainly can't so I still optimize my images and keep bloat out of my code to ensure that my web pages load sufficiently to engage the surfers inside that 3 second window when people are prepared to wait to see what appears on their monitor.
The need for speed is still there and if you're too lazy to optimize your images and code to ensure fast download speed then those of us who do will gladly take the money that you're leaving on the table.