Survey: When Is A Website Too Slow?

[bigredseo]

We're running a survey on a number of different forums & mediums regarding website speed. If you can post your answer, we'd really appreciate it.

On a website, when is it too slow? At what point do you start to get annoyed?

Specifically, we're looking at page usability/loading, and not necessarily 100% page load/rendering time. Some sites use "lazy loading" to load images at the bottom of the site only when you get to it.

 

[SenseiSteve]

I voted for 3+ seconds. If you look at GTmetrix's page load speed results, some sites that load in one second get lower scores than others that load in 2 seconds. Once you get up to 3 seconds, something isn't right. Of course, this depends on what type of site this is. Forums typically load in 4 to 5 seconds. Rackspace.com loads in 7 seconds, but scores well on PageSpeed scores. I'm actually not so quick to move on if a site loads slow, of course unless I can fix lunch while waiting.

 

[bigredseo]

I'm right there with you. The subject of the site can greatly influence the speed of that site. Of course, my level of patience is also much higher than most.

It's been interesting seeing the results on the various platforms.

Twitter: 3+ seconds
Facebook: 5+ seconds
Discussion Forums: 5+ seconds
ECommerce Forums: 7+ seconds
Tech/Programming Forums: 9+ seconds

These are the averages of results that we're seeing so far through the various places that we've posted the poll.

As expected, the Twitter audience were very quick to say when a website is slow, and programmers/researchers appear to be willing to wait for a site if they're looking for answers.

More info to come as we get more details over the next week or so!

 

[SenseiSteve]

I'm looking forward to your updates. Your result from Twitter seems appropriate given the platform.