Website download speed and visitors - has anything changed?
There has a lot been said about download speed of websites and how it affects website visitors. But since the connection speed researches are out-dated now and some have broadband, does website download speed matter at all?
There have been a lot of studies on the influence of download speed on the visitors.
Some are really dated, even extinct now (Zona Research, “The Economic Impacts of Unacceptable Web Site Download Speeds”, circa 1998):
- Web Site Delays: what can you do? (PowerPoint presentation by Dennis Galletta, Ray Henry, Scott McCoy, and Peter Polak, 2003)
- The truth about download time by User Interface Engineering, 2001
- Jacob Nielsen on web download speed 1997, 2000, 2004, and response times overview
- “Broadband means more online spending” and worldwide broadband usage overview at Clickz, Nov, 2005
They all speak about how creating faster loading websites is helpful to the visitors. Is still download speed as important as before in the age of the broadband?
First of all, if the broadband speeds have increased and now nearly 40% of the US population has broadband, does it mean the web designers are free to use as much graphics as they want? Not so fast.
Of course, broadband make surfing the Net much more enjoyable. But the response times and times people like to wait for sites to load shouldn’t have changed. If anything, they are more likely to decrease as people get used to everything loading fast.
The fact that broadband users are likely to purchase online simply states that download time indeed plays a major role on the Internet. This can be applied to any site visitor with any website connection speed.
Moreover, if a lot of people use broadband, it doesn’t mean that everyone uses it. This leaves us with another, major, part of the world-wide population who use dial-up or equally slow connections.
Furthermore, even if we make a site load faster for a broadband user, he will appreciate it, as, judging by Nielsen’s research, a tolerable response time is about 1.0 second. How many sites do you know that load faster than 1.0 seconds (becides Google)?
That leads us to a conclusion that it is to early to disregard website download speed. It has too many implications on our users, who may come from every part of the world with any Internet access, be it South Africa, China or anywhere else.
Of course, we don’t really need to disregard the aspect of site download speed perception. The easier it is to find the information, the more interesting the site, the faster it is perceived to load. Which brings us to not only having faster loading websites, but easily navigatable websites as well.
What do you think about website download speed right now?
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