Web Design Articles
articles indexSlow Web Pages Waste 2.5 Days A Year
11 May 07
A report by 1&1 Internet estimates the average web surfer in the UK spends 2.5 days each year waiting for slow web sites to load.
Slow loading pages are the number one annoyance for web users, causing negative emotional responses from short temperedness to physical aggression. The survey indicates that most users will wait no longer than 1 minute for a page to load.
Crucially for business web sites, a huge 85 per cent of users say that their perception of a business is negatively affected by a slow web site. This causes over 90 per cent to turn to a competitor's web site for information, products and services.
The results of this survey are a strong reminder to web site owners and online businesses that visitors are not willing to tolerate bad design decisions that cause them to waste their time unnecessarily. In the end, these sites will lose their visitors and customers to competitors who have taken the time to improve the speed and usability of their sites.
With most users now connecting to the Web via good speed broadband connections, surfers nowadays expect to be able to get access to the information they want straight away.
Slow loading can be caused by a number of factors but is often due to poor web hosting, badly optimised coding, or heavy media and Flash content. Slow transfer speeds for files such as videos, images and music can also cause frustration, especially when that content could have been better encoded, resized or compressed.
Although thankfully rarer nowadays, splash screens and advertisements that load before a web page is even displayed can still cause irritation and send many users off to other web sites. Another contributor to so-called "web rage" is overly-elaborate or obscure Flash navigation.
It's common sense to let visitors get access to what they want quickly, to increase their satisfaction and likelihood of repeat visits, but there has always been the temptation with web design to go overboard and make use of the ability of this media to add fancy animations, videos, sounds and effects that do little to add to the visitor experience.
Although there are certain cases where an elaborate, media-heavy design can be very successful to promote things such as bands, movies and computer games, for most information web sites it's simply not necessary and just tests visitors' patience, eventually driving them away.
In the Internet age with our busy lives, waiting for a total of 2.5 days a year for web sites to load is a lot longer than we should be prepared to put up with to get at the information we need.
