Need For Speed

Raise your hand up if you waited for more than 5 seconds for this article to load. That’s what I thought. Although we have dedicated blog readers, we do not expect them to stick around should our blog take a painful amount of time to load.

Research shows that 90 percent of visitors will leave a site if they have to wait more than ten seconds for it to load. Stakeholders agree that optimum speed is no more than four seconds, though some studies suggest two seconds is closer to visitor expectations today. What this means is that a couple of seconds can make the difference in keeping visitors on your website or driving traffic away.

A study by Akamai in 2006 revealed that 75% of users would not return to websites that took longer than 4 seconds to load. It is now a decade later and there’s the small matter of Instagram, Twitter and other places people would rather check in than die waiting for your website to load. Indeed, a recent study by the University of Nebraska put the acceptable time as 2 seconds. Only this page can load as fast. Try it. If it takes more than 2 seconds, change your Wi-Fi service providers.

It gets more serious.  A study by LightSpeedNow showed that by making a website faster Google sent 15% more traffic, and Bing and Yahoo also sent more traffic.

 You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.

Google Webmaster Central Blog.

WHAT A SLOW SITE CAN DO FOR YOU.

Disclaimer: The following are not favors.

1. Drive Your Audience Away.
2. The Gomez Peak Time Internet Usage Study conducted by Equation Research on 1500 consumers (February 2010) found out that at peak traffic times, only 25% online consumers waited patiently for a site to down. The rest fled to competitors, with 88% never to be seen again. It can’t get any worse than that, right? Wrong! More than a third of the disappointed lot could not resist the temptation of letting others know of their feelings. And, again, that was years back. Now that we are living in the last days; your guess is as good as mine.
   

   A 0.5 second delay in page load speed reduced traffic by 20%. Speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them.

   Google

3. 2. Slow Down Revenue.
4. No one needs a survey to know that a good percentage of online shoppers take loading time as the key factor in determining their favorite e-commerce store; something which has a shout in a company’s competitive advantage.

   Often the slower websites have high bounce rates with poor sales. The frustration caused by that is enough to lose a customer forever’
   Take, for example, Shopzilla. The company generated 12% more revenue and 25% more page views by simply improving the website speed from 6 seconds to 1.2 seconds. Not ones to be left behind; with Yahoo got a 9% increase in the traffic while Mozilla got 60 million more downloads by simply improving the web page speed to 2.2 seconds faster.

WHAT NOW?

Besides the architecture of your web pages, databases, a website’s speed is determined by the speed of hosting servers. Dedicated hosting may be the way to go, with shared hosting dragging back the load speed as multiple websites fight for attention. But dedicated servers have more reliable infrastructure, bandwidth, and resources to do make sure your website is speedy and your target audience is up to speed with what you want them to do.

Need some speed? Let’s go!