A recent report indicates that, despite the importance people place on internet business website offerings and functionality (such as ease of navigation, streaming video, etc.), users put a premium on website speed. All of which means that the time it takes a web site to load is still critical, and that speed must still be a primary consideration for developers when it comes to web development and building, launching and modifying web sites.

Revealing Facts

Here are some of the interesting facts the report uncovered:

  • More than a third of users rate speed over functionality, with only about 20 percent favouring functionality over speed
  • 84 percent of users give up on poorly performing sites after only a few tries
  • A site that is slow will be abandoned within 5 seconds by one third of users

Faster Mobile Access

Mobile speed’s an important consideration also:

  • Mobile users accessing mobile sites account for a third of web users
  • Mobile users’ expectations are high regarding internet access on their mobile device, with over half looking to web sites to load just as fast, almost as fast or faster on their mobile devices than their computers

Poor Performance Won’t Do

Surprisingly, slow load times and poor performance are not unusual, leaving users feeling frustrated:

  • Over a third of users stated they would avoid a slow web site in future, with more than a quarter being likely to switch to a competitor’s site
  • Two thirds come across a poorly performing web site several times a week
  • When it comes to mobile internet usage, the top 2 issues are formatting, which oftentimes does not translate well to mobile devices, and very slow loading

Tasks Left Incomplete

Many users complain about the fact they’re unable to complete certain tasks on some web sites:

  • Over the preceding 3 months, almost half of users had given up on sites where they were left hanging
  • Over 80 percent weren’t able to complete specific tasks, such as a purchase or a registration, when visiting a particular web site at least once

What Does All This Mean?

It appears that users’ loyalty and patience evaporate pretty quickly where poor performing web sites are concerned. And the sad fact is that a lot of companies are either unaware of or choose to ignore the fact that, when it comes to users’ time spent online, seconds really do count. Spoiled by the lightning-fast speeds of the best-on-the-web sites such as Yahoo, Facebook and Google, users expect all sites to at least come close to that type of speed.

So, what does this mean for your internet business site? According to this report, it means that users are obviously demanding and expecting their web experience to be as seamless as possible, so, when considering web development and designing your web site, or looking at the performance of your current site, you need to bear in mind that seconds on the web are the equivalent of hours in real life, and that whether a visitor becomes a customer or just another lost prospect can be decided in only a few seconds.

So, try making your landing page as simple as possible so that it loads quickly and encourages visitors to stick around and delve deeper into your site, where more complex functionality can be added that may be slower to load. But, by that time, your visitor may be intrigued enough to not be put off, as long as we’re only talking about a few more seconds load time and not minutes. If it’s minutes, we got problems!

And then there’s the challenge of getting a site to perform adequately in the mobile world. The internet experience on a mobile device will, by nature, be slower than on a computer due mainly to the relative processing power of a mobile device, which means you’ve already got your back to the wall where mobile’s concerned. As mentioned earlier, mobile users expect web pages to load at least as quickly as on their computers.

So, a major consideration in designing your web site and its pages should be mobile users. Many companies are now providing a completely separate web site for their mobile users to take advantage of mobile marketing, a site specifically designed and built to load quickly and efficiently on a mobile device with functionality stripped to a minimum in the interests of user satisfaction.

The number of users turning to their mobile devices for all their online tasks is increasing rapidly and shows no signs of abating, so the sooner you take a serious look at your internet business and web development with a view to optimal mobile performance, the better. Consider yourself warned.

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