88 websites visited per day per user
After studying 1 billion web pages globally, New Relic has determined that it takes an average of six seconds for a web page to load and success of a site is relative to its speed.
Over a one week span, they studied actual page loads on sites, testing various browsers, operating systems and even mobile and while six seconds may not sound like a long time, New Relic CEO Lew Cirne noted that “Nielsen data suggests that it takes only one second before a user starts to notice a delay.”
That’s code for users are A.D.D. and move on if they sense a delay. The study found that it’s not necessarily the servers or the network, rather most of a user’s load time is spent at the browser level as it downloads JavaScript, interprets HTML, etc. This is a major reason web site designers are trying to tell clients, especially button-addicted-Realtors that having dozens of assets on your site that consumers have to load, it slows the site down and it’s not just a geeky thing to want a speedy site, consumers are actually leaving when sites are slow to load. That’s just bad business if your storefront is a website.
Study results:
Methodology
According to New Relic, “Both our customers and we here at New Relic have learned a lot from looking at the Real User Monitoring data that’s been coming in fast and furious over the last month. Based on the javasrcipt library created by Google’s Steve Souders, RUM shows what performance issues actual users are experiencing on a site, right now.”
“How? Via New Relic’s server-side agent, JavaScript is dynamically inserted into pages as they are built. The injected JavaScript collects timing information in the browser and contains details that identify the specific app and web transaction processed on the backend as well as how time was spent in the app for each request. When a page completes loading in an end user’s browser, the information is sent back to New Relic asynchronously – so it doesn’t effect page load time.”
Ben Fisher
June 27, 2011 at 8:30 am
6 seconds is way too long. I was under the assumption we needed to be right around 3?
Chase
June 27, 2011 at 11:21 am
Yea I'm with you Ben, I thought 3 or under was the average and where you wanted to be – if not faster.
I can definitely say that since we optimized our blog and website to load within 3 secs we've had much better bounce rates and such. Definitely worth investing time into, to see where you're at.
Fred Romano
June 27, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Under 3 seconds is doing good, but definitely 6 is way too long. There are great tools for website owners to use to optimize their performance. W3 Total Cache is the best for WordPress run sites. Our site runs about 2.25 seconds to fully load the homepage.
stephanie crawford
July 6, 2011 at 12:02 am
Hey agents, which WP plug-ins do you find slow page load time the most? Lani, where did you get your new social sharing buttons? I'm wanting to update mine.