Track and field (or Internet marketing) insiders may already know that website speed has been written about before by Google and usability expert Jakob Nielsen, but one of the newest findings may surprise (via the Times story above):
You’ve probably heard the expression, “Go big or go home.” I say, “Go fast or lose customers.” How’s that for competitive advantage?
Keep your site lean and brisk … Vin Diesel and Keanu Reeves would be proud.
You don’t need to follow track and field to know who Usain Bolt and Tyson
Gay are, and now you don’t need to work in Internet marketing to know
about the importance of website speed for keeping visitor interest,
thanks to today’s front-page New York Times story.
Track and field (or Internet marketing) insiders may already know that
website speed has been written about before by Google and usability
expert Jakob Nielsen, but some of the newest findings may surprise:
“People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close
competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth
of a second).”
Our attraction to speedy websites may be subconscious, but the effect is
no less powerful for us not even perceiving it.
Incidentally, 250 milliseconds is faster than the time it takes a
99-m.p.h. fastball to reach the plate, but actually slower than one beat
of a dragonfly’s wings.
There’s applications all over the place:
General: If any web page is bad, people will leave it in a few seconds.
If it’s good, they could stay a few minutes. The key is what they find in
the first 10-20 seconds,
[http://www.useit.com/alertbox/page-abandonment-time.html]
Organic search:
Video: “Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls
while loading.”
Paid search: If your landing page doesn’t fire up quickly, impatient
visitors will favor another, faster one.
Email: E-newsletter subscribers might be suspicious of (or altogether
ignore) links you put in emails if the pages they launch don’t load at
the right speed. Your messages miss the mark they otherwise would have
hit.
Mobile: (link to Abby’s post) … *lack* of speed can even make some
people furious
Google formally introduced site speed as a ranking factor in its
algorithm two years ago. It also published internal studies showing that
visitors spend less time on less responsive sites and that having faster
sites can also reduce operating costs.
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-w
eb-search-ranking.html]
It even has a whole section of its coding site devoted to it.
Even back in 1997, when most people weren’t using high-speed Internet,
speeds of under a second were paramount when moving from page to page. A
decade or two prior to that, IBM studies from the 1970s and 1980s showed
greater productivity on mainframes when users experienced a sub-second
lag time between a keystroke and the corresponding screen.
What does all this mean today?
You’ve probably heard the expression, “Go big or go home.” I say, “Go
fast or lose customers.” How’s that for competitive advantage? Make Vin
Diesel and Keanu Reeves proud.You don’t need to follow track and field to know who Usain Bolt and Tyson
Gay are, and now you don’t need to work in Internet marketing to know
about the importance of website speed for keeping visitor interest,
thanks to today’s front-page New York Times story.
Track and field (or Internet marketing) insiders may already know that
website speed has been written about before by Google and usability
expert Jakob Nielsen, but some of the newest findings may surprise:
“People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close
competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth
of a second).”
Our attraction to speedy websites may be subconscious, but the effect is
no less powerful for us not even perceiving it.
Incidentally, 250 milliseconds is faster than the time it takes a
99-m.p.h. fastball to reach the plate, but actually slower than one beat
of a dragonfly’s wings.
There’s applications all over the place:
General: If any web page is bad, people will leave it in a few seconds.
If it’s good, they could stay a few minutes. The key is what they find in
the first 10-20 seconds,
[http://www.useit.com/alertbox/page-abandonment-time.html]
Organic search:
Video: “Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls
while loading.”
Paid search: If your landing page doesn’t fire up quickly, impatient
visitors will favor another, faster one.
Email: E-newsletter subscribers might be suspicious of (or altogether
ignore) links you put in emails if the pages they launch don’t load at
the right speed. Your messages miss the mark they otherwise would have
hit.
Mobile: (link to Abby’s post) … *lack* of speed can even make some
people furious
Google formally introduced site speed as a ranking factor in its
algorithm two years ago. It also published internal studies showing that
visitors spend less time on less responsive sites and that having faster
sites can also reduce operating costs.
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-w
eb-search-ranking.html]
It even has a whole section of its coding site devoted to it.
Even back in 1997, when most people weren’t using high-speed Internet,
speeds of under a second were paramount when moving from page to page. A
decade or two prior to that, IBM studies from the 1970s and 1980s showed
greater productivity on mainframes when users experienced a sub-second
lag time between a keystroke and the corresponding screen.
What does all this mean today?
You’ve probably heard the expression, “Go big or go home.” I say, “Go
fast or lose customers.” How’s that for competitive advantage? Make Vin
Diesel and Keanu Reeves proud.
Long gone are the days of online marketing campaigns that strictly revolve around keyword rankings and organic traffic – with little to no focus on conversions. Keyword ranking reports and traffic are still important indicators of success, but as we have learned, there is so much more that goes into creating and managing a successful online marketing campaign. 
