'Net Features : load time

Website Speed Trumps Functionality for Users

Mike Phillips — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:30:00 GMT

"When Seconds Count” is the name of a report conducted by Equation Research on behalf of Gomez, released in September 2010. In this study, users were asked about their feelings toward website speed and how it affects their online visitation habits. The results are very interesting and point to the critical nature of website load time. This is important for developers to understand as websites are built, launched and re-launched. In an online environment where users expect deep functionality and offerings (such as streaming video and audio), speed cannot be an afterthought.

Included in their findings:

Nearly one-third (32 percent) of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between one and five seconds.

• 84 percent are only willing to try a slow performing website a few times before giving up.
• 39 percent say speed is more important than functionality for most websites, while only one in five rank greater site functionality as more important.

Speed also makes a difference when it comes to accessing a mobile site.

• A third of all Web users are also using a mobile device to access the Internet.
• More than half of mobile users expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone, compared to the computer they use at home.

Slow load times are common and users feel frustrated with poor performance.

• Two thirds (67 percent) of users encounter a slow performing website a few times a week or more.
• More than a third (37 percent) said they would not return to a slow site, and 27 percent would likely jump to a competitor’s site.
• For mobile web users, slow website load times and poor formatting are the top two issues encountered on the mobile Web.

Web users have visited sites and not been unable to accomplish their tasks.

• More than 80 percent of users say they have been unable to accomplish their tasks – such as completing a purchase or a financial transaction – on a specific website at least once.
• Nearly half (47 percent) say they have frequently abandoned sites where they couldn’t finish their tasks in the past three months.

“When web users encounter web or mobile site performance problems, their patience and loyalty run thin,” said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez. “However, many companies fail to realize that seconds really do count because their customers refer to best-in-class Web performers like Facebook, Google and Yahoo! as a measuring stick or standard for determining how fast all sites should be.”

Clearly, users are demanding a seamless experience on the Web - your site included. It's interesting to note that speed is considered more important than functionality, according to this survey. Just a few seconds can make the difference between a loyal, repeat visitor and a lost prospect. That makes landing pages a crucial part of the equation. For example, maybe a simplified landing page is best so that users stay on site and start to explore. Then you can direct them to other pages on the site where deeper functionality exists that might require a few more seconds of load time.

The mobile Web also represents a significant challenge. Typically, the mobile device is going to experience a longer load time - meaning that you are already at a disadvantage - even though users expect pages to "load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phone, compared to the computer they use at home." As such, it is important to consider mobile Web visitors when designing your pages. This study presents a solid argument for developing mobile-specific pages of your website. Mobile Web usage is rising quickly and does not appear to be slowing. You've been warned.

Yotta: The New Guy in Web Performance Analysis

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:41:00 GMT

Improve the user experience and you improve revenue, right? It only makes sense then that we're starting to see more companies enter a previously shallow pool of performance monitoring services on the market.

The latest is Yottaa which today unveiled a suite of free Web performance analytics tools in public beta (the company also announced the close of a $4 million round of venture funding from General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and CambridgeWest Ventures).

What makes Yottaa unique is that it offers open access and an easy to use service to monitor Web site performance; identify problems such as third-party widgets, network latency or errors with DNS; and track the relationship between performance and business metrics.

“The growing importance of web performance is well documented, from the fact that Google now incorporates page load time into search engine rankings, to Mozilla’s ability to increase Firefox downloads by 15 percent, simply by decreasing load time by 2 seconds,” said Coach Wei, Yottaa’s founder and CEO.

Yottaa’s first product, Yottaa Insight, is available in beta now and allows users to monitor, analyze and improve site performance -- for free.

As site performance becomes an increasingly important factor to boost conversion rates, influence search engine rankings and increase overall user engagement, it's time to start thinking about the ramifications of a slow-loading website.

Google: Site Speed a Ranking Factor

Mike Phillips — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:42:00 GMT

Google has officially announced that site load speed is a factor when determining rankings, not that it's a deal-breaker. According to Matt Cutts, ""While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point."

So, the chances your site will be affected are slim. But read between the lines on this one. Or, let Google's Webmaster Central Blog do it for you: "But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings."

It's only common sense that faster sites are more appealing to Web users. But knowing that Google places "a lot of value in speed" means that you should, too. The fact is, when Google decides to make a change to their search rankings -- any change -- website owners should take notice. While it might be a small factor in rankings today, it could loom much larger in the future.

Also from the Google blog are these suggested tools to check your site speed. Sometimes we can get caught up in the "cool" factor of Web page and lose sight of what's most important to users -- usability. Don't fall into that trap.

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

Delay Loading of Images (In Long Pages)

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:06:00 GMT

If you're a reader of Website Magazine's Design & Development Digest you are well aware of our affinity (actually it's nearing an obsession) with jQuery. Many of the plugins bring so much value to the Web experience that it's nearly criminal to not metnion those that really stand out when you come across them. Case in point - Lazy Load - a jQuery plugin developed by Mika Tuupola that delays the loading of images in long web pages.

If you've got a long web page with a lot of images then you're going to be impressed with Lazy Load. The plugin forces images outside of the viewport (the visible part of a web page) to not load until the user scrolls to them. The result is that pages load much faster.

Designers can set the threshold on how close to the edge an image should come before it is loaded. You can also set a placeholder image and a custom event to trigger loading. There's a lot more that goes along with it but those are the highlights. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

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