Survey Finds People Frustrated With Slow Websites

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I know this may be hard to believe but, a new survey claims that people do not like slow web sites. On top of that, the study also claims that consumers will go somewhere else if your website takes too long to load. Ya think? Thanks to Edward C. for this one.

Conducted by Equation Research, the study polled 1,500 people who use the Web at peak times such as holiday shopping, booking summer travel or executing trades during financial market shifts. It concluded that poor Web performance is rife in the retail, finance and travel industries, and that this has a dramatic and lasting impact on where consumers spend money online.
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...it was revealed that indeed, scissors are sharp, and also that fire is indeed "hot".
 
My diabolical plan is working inside our company. I have one server behind one T1 line shared by 300+ clients and employees and they don't have a choice and cannot go to other web sites because all of their work is here in this office on that one server.

Muhahahaha (huh, spellchecker wants to change this word to Mohammad. That explains so much).

Seriously though, I have 3 servers behind a single T1 line in this office, but 4 more servers collocated at a datacenter running on four T1 lines, 2 are replicating the local servers (DNS, AD and SQL). We're covered.

Nobody's complained so far. Most of the time, slowness are attributed to employee's Sprint broadband adapters. Steel plant + cellular signal = bad.
 
Azhar said:
My diabolical plan is working inside our company. I have one server behind one T1 line shared by 300+ clients and employees and they don't have a choice and cannot go to other web sites because all of their work is here in this office on that one server.

Muhahahaha (huh, spellchecker wants to change this word to Mohammad. That explains so much).
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Rofl. :D

In related news, it has been found most drivers do not like to sit in traffic and will change lanes to get around slower vehicles. Who'da thunk it?

Do we really need anymore of these pointless surveys and study's?
 
YouTube can be too slow! Even when you choose 360p the thing still takes 5min to load a 1min video. I resort to using Firefox addon DownloadHelper to download it directly because the Flash plugin sometime stalls partway through downloading the video.
 
I heard a study that people prefer Saturdays over Monday! :eek:

I get a kick out of these "Captain Obvious" studies. :D
 
Front pages should be under 200KB and under 15 requests. I'd guess that 95% of front pages aren't, or are under 200KB but make 30 requests across multiple domains (in multiple countries in some instances).

It's no surprise that people don't like poorly-designed and grossly inefficient sites.
 
Are the ones performing these "studies", students of the following?

master%20of%20the%20obvious.jpg
 
First our system creates people with short attention spans, blurbs in newspapers, magazines, fifteen second commercials, and then some connected researcher says the obvious. I'd like to know where to get some of that grant money.
 
I basically give it 10 seconds, then I'm off somewhere else...
 
While the obvious is obvious, the question is exactly how much pain can the customer tolerate before switching. This will provide the business a better idea of how much server they need or don't need. Being oversold/undersold is a hard pill to swallow when sinking money into a website.
 
10 seconds is generous. The only sites I wait longer than that are ones that I absolutely need.
 
DarthVain said:
...it was revealed that indeed, scissors are sharp, and also that fire is indeed "hot".
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LAWL!:D

Trepidati0n said:
While the obvious is obvious, the question is exactly how much pain can the customer tolerate before switching. This will provide the business a better idea of how much server they need or don't need. Being oversold/undersold is a hard pill to swallow when sinking money into a website.
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true.:)
 
If the web page takes longer than 4 seconds to load, you're doing it wrong.
 
Hey Kyle, that red X in the top right corner is looking mighty tempting! Time to upgrade the servers!

(For added loyalty bonus brownie points, you can ship all the old shit to my home address. PM sent) :D
 
I think the point is not that people quickly switch from a slow site, it's that they never come back. You could lose a third to half of your customers permanently after one or two bad experiences... due to (probably unreasonable) expectations of speed during peak hours.
 
The only site I ever have an issue with is Adobe's. Slow at rendering and downloading.

Flash is like 1.8MB but I've seen it take 5mins+ to download.
 
these are probably the same people still running 256MB RAM / Pentium 4 machines with Bonzi Buddy, Weather Bug, etc and they wonder why modern websites take forever on their systems.
 
I think a lot of the problem is that websites are too heavy on the overhead. What used to be done with some straight HTML is now embedded with so much Java script and Flash it's not funny. That's nice when you have a clean route to the site and a fast machine, but the more traffic to the site, the worse it gets, and web browsers are not always the most efficient process in a system. A more streamlined web page helps everyone. It may seem pretty obvious, but looking at the page source to some websites, and the number of scripts they try to run, I cringe. Efficiency does not seem to be much of a priority.

This is also why I do most online shopping in the wee hours. Why fight the crowd when the internet is 24/7? :p
 
Funny the article says "peak times". Really this has less to do with network congestion and more to do with horrible, horrible code. :)

Of course that could then lead to congestion... oh well. Point withstanding!
 
evilsofa said:
If the web page takes longer than 4 seconds to load, you're doing it wrong.
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Or you have slow internet or left firefox on for hours so the memory can leak out every pore :D Main reason I switched to Chrome, fast loading, has Adblock now, and Xmarks, and I can crash a tab instead of the whole thing, and no memory bleeding. When firefox fixes this, then Ill go back...maybe
 
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