What Do We Want? Your Website to Load! When Do We Want it? Now!

If it took a website as long to load as it takes you to finish reading this sentence, you’d probably have abandoned it by now.

And if you’re still here: congratulations, you’re in the patient minority.

We all knew that page load speed was a huge factor on the web (See: humans and their lack of patience throughout history), but new data indicates that users’ need for speed may have an even stronger impact on digital performance than previously imagined: 

From RWW: [W]e remain impatient once we click through that top result Google gave us: half of us will abandon a Web page that takes more than four seconds to load. The stakes are getting even higher as more traffic moves to mobile devices: 40% of shoppers accessing an e-commerce site with their smartphone give up after just three seconds of waiting for a page to load.

Here’s an official looking infographic to back up the claims:

Source: OGP

[Image: adactio]