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Waiting For The Web Doors To Open
by Joe Erbacher
You rush down to a local store to pick up a few last-minute items. A sign on the door says "Please Press Button and Wait for the Door to Open", so you press the button. Then you wait. Five minutes later, the door finally opens.
How many people do you suppose would become frustrated during this wait? And how many will just give up and leave?
Well, this is exactly the kind of frustration you are asking visitors to your Web site to endure when you expect them to wait five minutes for your Web doors to open.
Earlier this year, I surveyed 300 Internet users to find out how long they are willing to wait for the first page of a Web site to load.
When accessing a site they had never before visited, 62% of the respondents said they felt frustrated if the first page didn't load within 30 seconds; 34.3% claimed they would give up and go elsewhere if the page hasn't loaded in that time. After a full minute has passed, 65.3% will be gone from the site--many of them never to return.
Businesses of every ilk are shifting more and more of their resources onto the Internet. They set up Web sites, publicize them, and get ready to service their new online customers. Many of them then proceed to discourage visitors from entering their sites by greeting them with pages that are exasperatingly slow.
Not all companies, of course, still live in the dark ages of 1997. Last year, The Boston Globe announced that it was listening to its customers and redesigning its site so that it loaded more quickly. They removed the frames and large graphic images. And several of the major search engines load much faster today than they did a year or two ago. These companies have obviously gotten the message.
A number of the Web sites I've had an opportunity to review were able to have their download times cut in half without impacting the appearance of the sites or the quality of their graphics. The only thing needed was an image editor.
Some sites can actually be speeded up by an order of magnitude by designing smaller, more-sensible images--and by removing frames and useless Java applets. Others still don't make use of the image attributes that will allow the text to appear while the images are loading.
One respondent to our survey summed up the feelings of many: "I can't believe that these alleged professional sites take longer and longer to load....Too much junk that is nothing more than bells and whistles. Too many people don't know how to code HTML so that at least something comes up within 5 seconds." Another was even more succinct: "I want speed,
not unneeded graphics."
Keynote Systems, a company that does Internet performance measurements, released in December its Web Brokerage Index which rates the Web sites of twenty stock brokers according to performance and availability. The best performer was Web Street (with an average download time of 2.97 seconds), and the worst was Charles Schwab (at 26.7 seconds). There's that order-of-magnitude difference I mentioned.
What's the bottom line? When the front door to a Web site takes too long to open, prospects and customers will flee, resulting in lost sales and earnings for the siteowner. It's a simple, closed-door case.
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Joe Erbacher is president of P. Zazz Marketing Corporation, a company that specializes in Web-site design and Internet marketing. Details of the survey mentioned in this article can be found on his Web site at www.zazz.com.
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