March 7th, 2012 • Posted by Kathleen Gardenswartz • Permalink
Your business website has a millisecond (thousandth of a second) before a consumer will move onto your competition online. It's time to consider the advantage of being fast online, really fast.
"Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web," said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft." -Steve Lohr, New York Times
In the past few years, consumer expectations have changed dramatically, we feel disadvantaged if we don't get what we want fast enough. Given that computers and Smartphone's have become an integral part of our daily routine, slowing down and waiting for a website to load is grating and reduces our thought flow. Way back in the 1990's, it was normal to click our mouse and then wait an eternity before anything would come up on the screen. To this day, it's impossible to forgot the unbearable buzzing sound that accompanied a dial-up, 300-baud modem on a Commodore 64 computer. Remember the never-ending wait? We would never put up with that kind of delay today, even on our mobile devices.
Speed-junky Smartphone and tablet users are downloading videos, getting news updates and searching for maps at an explosive rate, generating a virtual online traffic jam. Local businesses need to understand that a sluggish website reduces the user-experience and unswervingly correlates to a less engaged visitor who rarely lingers on your website, exits quickly and will not look-up your business hours, purchase an Instant Gift Certificate or read your business blog.
According to Steve Lohr's article in the New York Times speed of websites varies radically today, and so do consumer's expectations.
"A person will be more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a search result. And Web sites constantly face trade-offs between visual richness and snappy response times. But speed matters in every context, research shows. Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading."
Designing your website for optimal speed is expected, and ignoring it will cost you revenue and customers. That said, consumers have a different set of speed expectations for load times on Smartphones, but the demand is increasing there as well.
Mobile load-time expectations today, according to econsultancy.com:
- 74% of users will abandon after waiting five seconds for a mobile site to load.
- 57% have experienced problems when accessing a mobile site.
- 46% would not return to a poor performing site.
So what website design advice do our website developers say about increasing your speed?
- Analyze each element of your website for speed.
- Don't ignore your website's load-time when designing your website, remember you are their to satisfy their needs.
- Infatuation with flashy visuals in your website design will slow it down.
- Demanding needless confusion that results in an heavy website will diminish the speed of your website.
- Less is more. Keep your website design clean and stay away from flash at all costs.
- Reduce image file sizes to make pages load faster. Don't add music and needless confusion on the homepage.
- Avoid all auto-play including ads, music or videos and don't put too much content or unnecessary media on your business website.
- Most visitors are using some version of a 5-10 year-old computer so the load-times must be ideal for those feeble machines. It will reduce crashes caused by too much data.
