Back in November 2006 at a Web 2.0 conference Google had some interesting facts to share about speed, user experience and user satisfaction.
They asked a group of Google searchers how many search results they wanted to see. Users asked for more, more than the ten results Google normally shows. More is more, they said.
Google ran an experiment where they increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.
Why did that happen? Didn’t users want more?
Well Google found an uncontrolled variable.
The page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds.
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
Amazon.com had a similar experience…
They tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
So how have things changed over the past 2 years?
How long would you wait for a website to load?
4 seconds? 10 seconds? 30 seconds?
Since I’m part of popular gaming website in India, I know that a user won’t mind waiting for a particular game to load. But he gets really impatient when the homepage doesn’t load really quick.
A lot of financial decisions are also made based on the heaviness of a page. Video ad networks ask us to put their tags on pages which take a minimum of 10 seconds to load. Though this might irritate the end user, having a quick loading page can make a video ad lose its impact. As a portal do you put a banner size limit for clients?
The tolerance level varies. A return visitor to your website will be more forgiving but a new user won’t. In the modern day when a regular net user is surfing with multiple browsers and dozens of tabs open, even a slight delay will equate to a loss of a visitor.
At the time of writing this post, I have more than 20 tabs open!
Speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them.
But WATBlog takes more than 20 seconds to load man. Please do make it fast. You are the best in Blogging..
Akamai has published 4 seconds as the threshold for acceptability of web responses. – http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2006/press_110606.html
I second Karthik’s comment. WATBLOG takes much more than 4 seconds to load.
@Kartik & @mahesh – I agree – It takes under 4 seconds on a 512kbps connection though but I completely agree we need to fix some stuff on our end too. I guess we want to reorganize our site in a way that appeals to new users as well as retains our loyal readers.. now thats a tough balancing act thats taking some thinking on our end.. but we are on it for sure.
Though i cannot locate the source, there was a recent report on Search Engine effectiveness : Google versus Yahoo versus MSN. The result was that Google is as a favourite by many users because of its simplicity of the pristine front end. Its simple, easy to understand and use, intuitive and “light”. It gives the feeling of simplicity and earnestness. MSN and Yahoo have a lot of other elements and frames in the page, which make them slower and don’t give them the pristine feeling!
Off hand, i seriously find the full/half page “peeling” ads very very painful. Who so ever’s idea it is, the content providers and the site owners must see to it that it doesn’t act as a turn off and are relevant to the audience!
Good post