Do You Care About Webpage Load Times?
Christmas season is quickly approaching and lot's of consumers will be hitting up the web for online shopping. There was a recent (biased) study about the the tolerance for web page load times. This recent study concluded that if your website takes longer than 4 seconds to load , consumers will leave the site and have a 75% chance of "likely" never returning again. I find it extremely annoying when websites are slow...I get impatient very quickly. I have no doubt that long load times will discourage customers from using a particular site.
But how did they determine the 4 second benchmark? They give no details on how they collected their data (I didn't leave my contact information to get the full report, but it is available if anyone were to bother signing up), and the only evidence of data collection is surveys. So they used surveys to determine a precise number like 4 seconds? Sounds a little fishy....but it's something that could be calculated quite acurately if researched correctly (maybe they did, but I can't tell from the press statement). The reason the report is biased is because it is sponsored by Akami, who is in the business of "accelerating content and business processes online".
So what can YOU do to optimize page load times? There was a recent article about what can be done to improve webpage load times. This is how I like data presented - discussion of experimental procedures used, graphs of relevant data and insightful results analysis/discussion.
Anyway, the biggest tip was enabling HTTP pipelining. To do this in Firefox, type "about:config" into the address bar and search for "pipelining" (The actual field is "network.http.pipelining" or "network.http.proxy.pipelining if you are using a proxy server). Doubleclick it to become true. Unfortunately, a lot of the advice depends on implementation done by the website designers/administrators. I haven't had pipelining enabled for too long now, but so far it doesn't seem to break anything...
And last, but not least is the Saga of Friendster. I loved the idea behind the Friendster website when it came out. But how is Friendster related to the rest of this post? Well, I stopped using Friendster because it was slow. Like glacially slow. Like glacially ass slow. In the article they mention wait times of 45 seconds! Damn.
It is so unpopular now that it is "ranked 14th among all social networking sites tracked by comScore Media Metrix, trailing even myYearbook.com, a site started last year by a 16-year-old high school student". But I have to give it props to being the precursor to sites such as www.myspace.com and www.facebook.com, which happens to be my current drug of choice. With that horrible ranking in mind, I'm thinking some people (for example Joanne & Robert) should ditch Friendster for something more, uh, contemporary. BTW I just uploaded some new pics to Facebook, so go check it out.
P.S. The article I linked to about Friendster was actually from The New York Times, and it is currently in their pain-in-the-ass pay-for-access Archives. I saved it and hosted it on my University webspace - just for you - so go read it! It's well written and the even the Friendster VC's admit to their slow ass website. Hopefully The New York Times doesn't send me a C&D letter though!
But how did they determine the 4 second benchmark? They give no details on how they collected their data (I didn't leave my contact information to get the full report, but it is available if anyone were to bother signing up), and the only evidence of data collection is surveys. So they used surveys to determine a precise number like 4 seconds? Sounds a little fishy....but it's something that could be calculated quite acurately if researched correctly (maybe they did, but I can't tell from the press statement). The reason the report is biased is because it is sponsored by Akami, who is in the business of "accelerating content and business processes online".
So what can YOU do to optimize page load times? There was a recent article about what can be done to improve webpage load times. This is how I like data presented - discussion of experimental procedures used, graphs of relevant data and insightful results analysis/discussion.
Anyway, the biggest tip was enabling HTTP pipelining. To do this in Firefox, type "about:config" into the address bar and search for "pipelining" (The actual field is "network.http.pipelining" or "network.http.proxy.pipelining if you are using a proxy server). Doubleclick it to become true. Unfortunately, a lot of the advice depends on implementation done by the website designers/administrators. I haven't had pipelining enabled for too long now, but so far it doesn't seem to break anything...
And last, but not least is the Saga of Friendster. I loved the idea behind the Friendster website when it came out. But how is Friendster related to the rest of this post? Well, I stopped using Friendster because it was slow. Like glacially slow. Like glacially ass slow. In the article they mention wait times of 45 seconds! Damn.
It is so unpopular now that it is "ranked 14th among all social networking sites tracked by comScore Media Metrix, trailing even myYearbook.com, a site started last year by a 16-year-old high school student". But I have to give it props to being the precursor to sites such as www.myspace.com and www.facebook.com, which happens to be my current drug of choice. With that horrible ranking in mind, I'm thinking some people (for example Joanne & Robert) should ditch Friendster for something more, uh, contemporary. BTW I just uploaded some new pics to Facebook, so go check it out.
P.S. The article I linked to about Friendster was actually from The New York Times, and it is currently in their pain-in-the-ass pay-for-access Archives. I saved it and hosted it on my University webspace - just for you - so go read it! It's well written and the even the Friendster VC's admit to their slow ass website. Hopefully The New York Times doesn't send me a C&D letter though!
posted by Nelson at 10:01 PM
3 Comments:
your go read it link needs to be fixed :P
Fixed.
Thanks anonymous!
Also the ppl behind the survey, Akamai (sp? too lazy) is a huge content provider on the net, they provide storage and bandwidth for lots of stuff such as iTunes store. So store your stuff with them to get sub 4 performance
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