Site loading time is a hot issue among web developers. Most traditionalists hold with 10 seconds before visitors start dropping off at a rapid rate.
With the exploding growth of broadband users, load-time is often discounted now. "Oh, who cares if our homepage is 600kb - our visitors have faster connections nowadays!". Well sure folks, your visitors have faster connections now, and they're getting used to it. They have less patience now than the good ol' days of dial-up. They're used to sites loading faster now, so if yours doesn't make the grade, you're in trouble.
Akamai and Jupiter Research have released a new study saying that online shoppers will wait a mere 4 seconds now before abandoning your site.
Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site. This is one of several key findings revealed in a report made available today by Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), commissioned through JupiterResearch, that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience.
The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.
In the interest of full disclosure, it appears that Akamai provide content-delivery services (to the likes of Apple and IBM), so this report is definitely in the favor. Whether its biased or not, who knows, but the findings make a lot of sense to me. I know I get frustrated with sites that take more than 2 seconds before I can start reading the content while the images load.