Impatient Web Users Fleeing From Sites that Take Longer than 250ms to Load

Gone are the days when Internet users had no problem waiting minutes for a website to load. Now, waiting considerably less than that can aggravates a user to simply exit and visit another Web site, according to Google engineers.

Google engineers did a study recently, which showed that Internet users find a Web site, which loads for 250ms, to be too long for comfort. This is strange behavior because 250ms is less than a second, it only proves how much of a change high speed Internet has brought about in our lives.

This is not good news for website administrators, though, if they cannot get their Web site to load as fast as users want it to be, because then they would simply move on to a competitor Web site to get their daily fix. Part of this problem is because many Web pages have advertisement that automatically loads when the page opens and when Internet users see this, they click away to another Web site.

Administrators must take into consideration that no one enjoys advertisement, especially those that pop up automatically before the contents you want to read. Never put advertising before your content loads - viewers are most likely not coming to your Site to view ads about hair loss.

A deeper study by Google also shows that users want faster search. A search wait time of 400ms can force a user to cancel and leave for somewhere else.

Subconsciously, you don't like to wait, said Arvind Jain, Google's speed guru engineer to the New York Times. Every millisecond matters.

When it comes to loading video on the Web, Internet users are willing to wait a little longer, but if buffering continues for too long, then the time to move on somewhere else has come. Speed on the Internet is becoming ever so important to Internet users and website administrators alike, a reason why all Web sites should have less bandwidth-hungry graphics on their pages.

With smartphones becoming ever so popular, getting from point A to point B on the Web will require a wait time below 250ms.

(Reported by Vamien McKalin, Edited by Surojit Chatterjee)