The latest user trends are dictating websites to provide more functionality, content, images, and advertisements. As you add these additional features this can add overhead that slows a website down negatively affecting your site in multiple ways. People do not want to spend time waiting for websites to load and below we are going to show you how much of an impact this really can have.

Usability

It is proven that after 8-10 second, users will begin to lose interest in your site if they do not find what they are looking for. Even in more recent studies, it was found that broadband customers prefer a 4 second loading time.

This 4 to 10 second limit is the point where the user will drastically lose focus on your website. As for websites, a user expects almost an "instant" loading effect, with little or no wait. For objects which take a bit longer time to load, there should be an indicator on how long the user will need to wait, so they know to come back. This can be done with a percentage, loading bar, or a countdown.

Site Profitability

A slow site will cause a loss in potential income. Whether your site makes money off of advertisement, ecommerce transactions, or through conversions of some sort; if your site is slow, you are losing cash.

Several companies such as Bing, Google, AOL, and Shopzilla have shown this at Velocity in 2009. Velocity is an annual web performance and operations conference promoting fast, scalable, efficient, and available web programming. Steve Souders of O'Reilly (Velocity's sponsor) had an excellent write up regarding these companies and their losses due to slow sites. Here are some stats from the world's top search engines:

• Bing with a 2 second slow down – Lost of 4.3% in revenue
• Google with a 400 millisecond delay – Loss of .59% of searches
  • Considering Google has 400 million searches a day (2006) this comes to 2.3 million lost
• Bing and Google both even experience loss after the delay was removed proving a long term effect

In addition, Google Maps experienced a jump of 10% in the first week and 25% in the second week when they optimized their homage from 100K to around 70K. This allowed people to access it quicker and more efficiently.

Although these statistics reflect the results of a delay on a large site, the same effect will happen on any site. Users do not want to use a lagging website, resulting in less traffic and less income.

Search Engine Optimization

On April 9th 2010 Google announced that they are now including website speed in their search engine algorithm. This is an initiative to all internet users to develop and work for a faster internet. Although site speed doesn't affect the content of the page and its reflection of your search, it may impair the user from accessing it. Therefore, the effect will not be large, but it still will be present.

How do I tell if my site is slow?

There are many tools out there that tell you the speed of your site and it compared to others. Many even offer suggestions on how to improve your sites speed. Here are some of my favorites to use:

YSlow – Firefox/Firebug plugin great for a quick grade and suggestions.
Google Webmaster – Speed over time analysis of all of your sites in an easy dashboard.
Web Page Analyzer –Web based quick suggestions on your site
Pingdom – Graphical representation of loading times

My site is slow, now what?

As for making your website faster, Savvy Panda can help. If you are interested in learning more please contact us for a free consultation on your site's speed.