While website load time was a major focus and concern ten years ago, as internet connection speeds have gotten faster and technology has advanced – many of us have forgotten the impact that a slow-loading site can have on our visitors.  As the internet was in its early stages and just starting to evolve, several studies were done to determine how much of an impact load time had on visitors.  Over the years the recommended time has changed and continues to get lower each year.

The evolution of recommended load times

There have been several studies over the years that show how load time affects your visitors and their abandonment of your site:

• 1999 (the 8-second rule) - A study done in by Zona Research showed that you lose a large majority of your visitors if your site takes longer than 8 seconds to load.
• 2006 (the 4-second rule) - A study by Akamai and Jupiter Research showed that the new rule for load time should be 4 seconds for a site.
• 2009 (the 3-second rule) - Forrester Research released a study that states 40% of people will abandon a site if it takes 3 seconds or longer to load.

You can see from these studies that our threshold for what is an acceptable load time keeps getting shorter and shorter as each year goes by.

Why is my site or blog load time important?

The results from the most recent report by Forrester Research shows you how integral your load time can be to the success of your site.  Stop and think about these figures, if your site takes 3 seconds or longer to load – you can be losing 4 out of every 10 visitors! You have already done the difficult part by getting them to your site – don’t lose them once they are there.  Even with today’s website and blog platforms, you need to constantly be aware of your load time and how to improve it.

Sometimes things as seemingly insignificant as a picture that hasn’t been properly resized, can mean the difference between your site loading in 9 seconds or 2 seconds.

Don’t let your site potentially lose 40% of your visitors

You work so hard to to drive traffic to your site – make sure it loads fast so you can keep those valuable visitors on your pages and coming back for more.