Your Website Design Should Load in 4 Seconds!

How Fast Should A Web Page Load?

Are you losing customers because of a slow loading website design? Is your website frustrating your customers – meaning missed leads and sales? A slow-loading site can mean web shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load, a survey suggests.

The research by Akamai revealed users’ dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up. Akamai claim 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load. The time it took a site to appear on screen came second to high prices and shipping costs in the list of shoppers’ pet-hates, the research revealed.

Akamai consulted those who shop regularly online to find out what they like and dislike about e-tailing sites. About half of mature net-shoppers – who have been buying online for more than two years or who spend more than $1,500 (£788) a year online – ranked page-loading time as a priority. Akamai claim that one-third of those questioned abandon sites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.

The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading. To make matters worse, the research found that the experience shoppers have on a retail site colours their entire view of the company behind it.

About 30% of those responding said they formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly put-together site or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.

Further research by Akamai found that almost half of the online stores in the list of the top 500 US shopping sites take longer than the four-second threshold to finish loading.

The survey questioned 1,058 net shoppers during the first six months of 2006. Consultants Jupiter Research did the survey for Akamai.

Whether this research is 100% valid is determined by your own experience. For instance, if you KNOW that the information you need is probably on a specific web page, you’ll probably wait a lot longer than ten seconds to see the info.

Undeniably, though, it’s been a long held belief in good practice website design that your website design needs to load fast if you want to keep visitors happy. This research only proves this.

See below how slow load times impact your business:

EDIT 2013 – Did you know load time is a google ranking factor? Also – in 2013 – your website should load EVEN FASTER than this article recommends! Check out how to speed up website load time.