Keep your Web Pages small

November 20th, 2006 • Related • Filed Under

When building web pages file size is still important. You might think that with so many people on broadband speed and DSL that load times would be less an issue, but research shows a different picture. Akamai and Jupiter Research. One of the astonishing results they found was that 4 seconds (four seconds) is the maximum length of time a user will wait for a web page to load before abandoning the page load process. Four seconds! Just a few years ago the same kind of research showed 8 seconds as the result. So, now that this number has been cut in half webmasters might have to rethink some of their strategies. 

If you offer something visitors desperately want and they know you got it, they will wait for the page to load. If you offer something, but the page visitor does not exactly know what you have for them, they will abandon the load process more likely. So, if you are building pages still based on the “old” 8 second rule, you better start testing pages that load in 4 seconds. You might lose more sales or profits from your websites than what you would expect.

There Is 1 Response So Far. »

  1. Comment by leftboom on 21 November 2006:

    Because the threshold is now 4 seconds instead of 8 does not mean that you need to build your pages smaller! It’s a matter of taking advantage of the smaller CDN players out there that don’t charge the high Akamai prices. They can take your current site and cut the latency in half.