4 Seconds… Your Website Has to Respond Quickly
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on November 9th, 2006
Akamai and JupiterResearch have released a report announcing that 4 seconds is the “maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a web page to load”. The report focuses on retail sites (no surprise with the holiday season only weeks away) but the message rings true for just about any site and extends well beyond online shopping. As with any site that seeks to engage customers or clients - be it a specialty record store, a nationwide clothing chain or a professional services firm - the customer experience is paramount and that experience starts with the moment a visitor types your web address into their browser. A site that takes 10 seconds just to load is going to irritate any user that cares to wait that long.
The report notes that most shoppers who have had experience purchasing online cite page load time as a “top priority”, adding that a site’s navigation during key moments of the transaction - registration, log-in and check out - as another important factor.
So what can you do to put a little spring in your site’s step? A page that isn’t top-heavy (and by that I mean: relies on graphics, scripts and multimedia elements) generally loads pretty quickly. That doesn’t mean that you can’t include any of that stuff - just do it in a smart way that ensures the important parts of the page like the navigation load first and are available to the user before the eye candy fills in. How do you do that? Well, text should be used wherever possible for page headings and menus (this is obviously beneficial for SEO as well), graphics should be included in style sheets to keep your HTML markup lean and elements like Flash should be included using something like SWFobject.
Obviously a lot of other variables come into play like the user’s connection speed and proximity to the server but making a few small changes to how a page is built behind-the-scenes can go a long way to ensuring your site responds quickly without sacrificing any of its design integrity.
November 9th, 2006 » 8:08 am
Great reminder Steve! Even with broadband capacity and penetration gently increasing in Canada, there is still no reason to overtax the system or the user with heavy graphics that don’t really add any bang for the buck.
These days, virtually anyone can slap a site together, but creating strong design using quick loading graphics is still a finesse job that requires some planning and thought. Keeping it simple and using the content to drive the interest is still, and will forever be, the key.
From a design perspective, you have to ask if the heavy graphics significantly add to the experience or are they just glitz that may in fact have an adverse effect.
Again, great reminder…
November 9th, 2006 » 9:11 am
You’re bang on Joe. With us, it’s often a bit of tug-of-war between the designers and the developers to strip out the “superfluous” design elements (obviously a designer’s definition of superfluous differs slightly from a developer’s… hence the tug-of-war) but it always challenges the designers to defend their designs, which is a good thing. Sure I’d love to have to have all the text in a particular typeface and weight, but is it really that important at the end of the day that the menu items be in Myriad Pro Semibold vs. Verdana? Not usually.
Which reminds me… something I should have mentioned in the original post was sIFR - a fantastic technique that gives designers the ability to almost embed specific fonts in a site. It’s a brilliant mix of javascript, CSS and Flash and degrades gracefully. Can’t ask for much more than that!
November 11th, 2006 » 9:15 am
Good post Steve,
You mention the importance of SEO. What are your thoughts on this? Do you build measurable objectives into the plan for each new site you design? And then do you start measuring against a baseline so that you can track actual performance against those objectives? What kind of reports do clients get?
Maybe you could do a post on these questions?