4 Seconds Loading Time Is Maximum For Websurfers

nieske writes "Of course we all want webpages to load as fast as possible, but now research has finally shown it: four seconds loading time is the maximum threshold for websurfers. Akamai and JupiterResearch have conducted a study among 1,000 online shoppers and have found, among other results, that one third of respondents have, at one point, left a shopping website because of the overall 'poor experience.' 75% of them do not intend ever to come back to this website again. Online shopper loyalty also increases as loading time of webpages decreases. Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?"

Disturbing...

[rasmusneckelmann]

One of the main reasons why I'm considering upgrading my 233-MHz laptop, is not because it's slow at doing heavy calculations (like Matlab, etc), but because it will soon to be impossible to surf the 'net. Not only are webpages growing larger and larger kB-wise, but they're also using increasingly more CPU resources when loading. Why is it necesary for my poor laptop to run at 100% CPU usage for a long time, just because I want to view a website? When gmail just came out it worked perfectly fast on my computer, but more and more javascript have been stuffed into it, so now it's almost useless for me. The tendency is same for many, many websites.

Poor Layout

[COMON$]

I think poor layout is more of the problem than loading times. In the late 90s and up to 2003 or so, websites were aweful from an artistic standpoint, but many sites have gotten better.

But for me the ability to sort through goods is the #1 priority. Yes I like to have a pretty site to look at but if I cannot find what I am looking for with a few simple queries then I am gone. Newegg is a fine example of a site where I can find what I want quickly. Tigerdirect is getting better. Dell is the worst. I have a theory that Dell is like many supermarkets, they rearrange stuff and make searching difficult so you see the maximum number of items before finding what you are actually looking for.

Web designers, if you want business, make it easy. I dont really think most people go to sites just to browse. Most of the time we are there with a purpose and as an ADD generation we want it quickly or we will move on.

It can't be that simple.

[artifex2004]

I just can't imagine that someone who is used to using, say, Amazon.com, is going to blink, much less suddenly switch to another vendor, if they have a 15 or 20 second page load every once in a while. Now, sure, if they did it all the time, I'd start to wonder. But since a site like Amazon trades on the fact that it's a central clearing point for a vast selection of inventory, there's a built-in barrier to trying someone else based on the assumption that they are less likely to have it. There may also be barriers to switching based on unfamiliarity with alternate vendors, etc., but previous experience, if not outright customer loyalty and perception of being able to deliver the goods, really drive retention a lot more than how fast you can always get that page up.

Now, whether Akamai is being disingenuous or something else... I really couldn't imagine :)

Re:tabs

[From A Far Away Land]

There ought to be a lot more consideration given to dialup users this study finds. Bling might draw people back to the site, but only if it takes a second to load.

Flash? No thanks.

[Channard]

I'm on dial-up so I expect some long load times. However, if I get a flash webpage, I close it - I'm not messing about waiting an age for it to load. I'm not looking for some crappy 'multimedia experience' - I just want information, to buy something or whatever. I'm getting Broadband soon and I'll still be closing anything flash sites, no matter how fast they load. It's the web equivalent of powerpoint poisoning, and the worst thing is virtually every flash page I've seen hasn't been skippable.

Ignores Parallel Processing

[Hillgiant]

Tabbed browsing largely negates this. It takes me more than 4 seconds to digest any given page, so even if I am looking at only one slow site, I can still flip back and forth between two tabs, reading the one while the other loads.

Any web developers who didn't already know this

[Tetsugaku-San]

Don't deserve the title. I've been designing and developing websites since 1997 and I have ALWAYS worked to a maximum of 10 seconds for a page to download - even back in the day when everyone was on modems . People come to your site for a purpose, all the flashy crap designers love to put in is just a barrier between the user and that purpose.

Re:tabs

[Ash Vince]

The thing to remember is that most of the rest of the world have better internet connections than the US do now so pages load quicker for us.

Here in the UK slashdot is near instantaneous over 24 Megabit ADSL. 2 Megabit ADSL accounts are given away for free in the UK now with most phone connections. The slowest account people actually pay money for is 8 Megabit ADSL.

As for all the people saying they still use dialup, why? Here you can get better net connections than 56kbit using a mobile phone (3G - UMTS).

To me the idea of waiting 4 seconds for a page to load is monsterous, expecially if the next page I clicked took just as long even though half the images were already cached.

Speaking of AJAXian load times of favorite sites

[bberens]

Am I the only one who gets absolutely infuriated when it the g-mail on my google home page lags a second before coming up?

One thing I see a lot of developers do which really kills me is to actually load initial content with AJAX. This is the reason the Google home page is slow. Apparently other developers disagree with me, but I've always generated the initial load data server side on the original request and then used AJAX for updates only. AJAX shouldn't be generating your entire page layout from a call in the body onLoad.

Thanks,
bb

Re:Who is conducting that study?

[Fozzyuw]

Note that Akamai has a vested interest in this study.

Agreed, also, I would say the old humorous adage of...

Statistics show that 70% of statistics are wrong.

I'd also think that this is more FUD, since of course people are going to say "I'll never return to that website because once it never loaded for me". Of course, if said website was Amazon.com, I'm going to go all in and say that they will most likely return and that they where just unhappy at the time.

Also, what where the survey questions? Where they worded to direct people to answer in a certain way? For example, where they written like this...Would you visit a website again if you had recurring bad experience with it?. Most experts agree that 4 seconds and more is a long time for a website to load and contribute this to a bad user experience. Would you agree?.

Finally, this is a bit of a moot point, but page load times are not always the fault of the web server. Case in point, my wireless router sucks (hey, I got it from best buy for like $20 after rebates, I'm not complaining) and it will often just drop the wireless signal. This makes it appear that when you try to access a website, when you where just accessing another website just fine, that the website takes a long time to load or more often than not, doesn't load at all, making you think there are issues with that site, when there is not.

I'd rather point out the obvious when it comes to the Internet... people expect to find broken sites. It's just the way everyone has grown up with the 'net. Crappy designed sites with stale content and broken links, multiple browsers (IE(win), IE(Mac) , Netscape/Mozilla, Safari) on multiple systems (Mac, Unix/Linux, Windows), security issues, internet issues with their ISP, web servers that go down, etc, etc, etc. People know that the nature of the Internet is volatile. Sure, they'll get angry and might never return if your site is a small 'mom and pop' shop, but when it comes to the 'major' sites such as CNN, MSN, Amazon, eBay, etc; then they will most likely return, even if it takes more than 4-seconds (which it does on CNN and if I remember right, they use Akamai).

Saying 4 second load time will make customers never return is slightly FUD (since it's subjective). Saying a customer won't return if they type their zip code into their address bar, and your site claims it's invalid (when it's not) will probably do the trick. That's something web developers can change. Load times isn't alway in their hands. But that's not to say they shouldn't review their code for efficiency in execution.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:AJAX completely lacks performance.

[Bogtha]

AJAX suffers from some severe performance problems.

This is a nonsensical thing to say. It all depends on what you are doing. Ajax can significantly increase performance too. Remember when GMail was first launched? The #1 thing everybody said was that it was fast. Why? Because it used Ajax.

We looked into using several AJAX-based Web forum systems, from several different vendors. After trying them all, those of us who were working on the project were quite disappointed. The performance of the AJAX-based products was absolutely terrible.

Without mentioning what those systems were using Ajax for, there is zero useful information there. It's certainly possible that Ajax decreased performance in these cases, there's plenty of people throwing Ajax at things where it just isn't useful just because it's the buzzword du jour. On the other hand, there's also plenty of people using it as just another tool, and getting decent performance and usability improvements out of it.

In short: "Ajax completely lacks performance" == stupid. "Ajax harms performance when used to do [x], [y] or [z]" == useful information.

No. It's registration

[gelfling]

Registration causes me to abandon online store sites. I have a credit card. We've been working out the bugs for 50 years. Credit card sales work pretty well already. I am not going to waste a lot of time registering for your damn website in order to qualify to spend my money with you. Sorry. If you really really really really really really want me to do your market research for you I demand a discount - maybe free shipping, which is my other pet peeve. It really doesn't cost $15 bucks to pick, pull and pack that widget. I'll trade a few seconds of load up time for that. Now get to work assholes. I'm the customer, not you.

Not developers

[Angst Badger]

Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?

Developers already know this. But at the end of the day, we're paid to implement the ill-considered plans of marketers and designers.

Re:tabs

[wgaryhas]

I guess you have never wanted to have the descriptions of several items up and compare them? In my experience, it is only linear when you are ready to pay; searching and comparing products benefits greatly from tabs.

Re:tabs

[NotTheNickIWanted]

You can't open several tabs at the same time, one to view the description of the item, one to add the item to your cart, one to fill the shipping address, one to fill the credit card information, etc.

Online shopping is a linear process and tabs can't help that.

I disagree.

I routinely use tabs while online shopping, most commonly to open product descriptions in a new tab will leaving a product index unmolested in another. Additionally I do not recall any of the sites from which I have made purchases getting confused if I open a new tab to view a product description, add that item to my "cart" from the extra tab, then close the tab and continue browsing from the previously loaded index page.

I agree that the checkout is in most cases a linear process, but examining items and selecting them for purchase does not have to be.

Bull is not far from the truth

[trianglman]

I downloaded and read the whitepaper that is linked from that article. The summary is an obvious skewing of the actual findings to focus on Akamai's business. A couple key examples are: "Which of the following factors are most influential in your decision to continue shopping with an online store where you have shopped in the past? (Select all that apply.)" - 65% said good navigation, page load time was 8th of 13 with only 40%. "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single Web page to load before leaving the Web site? (Select one.)" - 21% said 3 - 4 seconds, however 30% were willing to give the page 5 - 6 seconds (broadband numbers) and another 38% were willing to wait more than 6 seconds.

Depends entirely on what...

[Kjella]

If I go to the front page of an online newspaper or similar site, I expect it to take long to load. If I click an article link, my patience is very thin because my target is simple article text, possibly with an illustration. Same with an online store. Also, there's a few tricks that lets the browser render it before it's loaded all the items - for example setting an image's height and width attributes. Not everyone has learned that yet. Also it depends on how much meaningful content there's on a page. If I have to visit a [break] new [break] page [break] for [break] every [break] sentence, I'm a lot less patient than if you just load it in one big honking page that I can scroll.

In short, measuring cost (time) without measuring benefit (content) is meaningless. If google's search page took four seconds to load, they'd be a dead duck. Other pages couldn't be rendered in four seconds with a Core 2 Quad and GigE, but are still highly successful. The pages you want to check is where the user asked you for something specific, in which case you'd better deliver ASAP without crapping up the page with everything he didn't ask for. Pages that are slow, I can live with. Pages that are slow, deliver little and waste time on meaningless stuff I don't.

Answer to a survey vs. Real world action

[The_Crowder]

The danger of conducting surveys is that the answer to a question often times varies from what a user will really do in the real world.

Take the topic of "...the New Threshold for Acceptability..." as an example, the survey asks the question: "Typically, how long are you willing to wait for a single web page to load before leaving the site?" 31% of users said that they were willing to wait less than 5 seconds for a page to load before leaving. I am willing to bet that if you were to evaluate the metrics of online retailers you would find that the number of people leaving your site after a sub 5 second page load is less than 31%.

On a similar note, this survey fails to tell us whether this is something a user is willing to put up with only once or on every page load. It is my suspicion that a one time page load of 5 - 6 seconds is not going to cause "A full one-third of online shoppers with a broadband connection..." to abandoned the page; however, I would be willing to accept that if every page took 5 seconds or more to load on a broadband connection you would see a large amount of users abandoning the site.

Finally, I found it very interesting that the survey limited the answers to 6 possibilities (sub 1s, 1-2s, 3-4s, 5-6s, 6+). In my opinion, they made a big assumption in choosing 6s as the threshold of acceptability...where did that number come from/why was it chosen as the cap? I think the survey would have been able to benefit from having a higher range, perhaps to 10s as suggested by Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html)

Re:Disturbing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that everything down to smartphones and the Nintendo DS now has a web browser - yes, pages should either work directly with low-end computers or offer alternatives that do.