How Slow is Slow When it Comes to Website Load Time?

How slow is slow when it comes to loading time for a website? It’s all about perception. Some studies show that 50 percent of people who have to wait more than five seconds for a website to load will click elsewhere. (How soon we forget the 1990s when we were willing to wait for as long as a minute or more for a website to load.)

As a content manager of a website, anything less than a few seconds of load time on my web pages makes me want to throw myself at the feet of the web development and IT teams and beg for mercy.  But I was somewhat reassured by what Aptimize CEO Ed Robinson says is the current accepted time: around seven seconds.

This is based on the average load times of Fortune 500 websites that Aptimize measured.  Robinson ran a quick test on the site associated with my pages and, well, let’s say that it wasn’t seven seconds. But at least it didn’t take as long as one Fortune 500 company, which shall remain nameless and unembarrassed until you look at the nifty infographic below from Aptimize—that company’s site took on average 51.82 seconds to load, according to Aptimize.

Aptimize optimized the loading time of a Microsoft site, SharePoint.Microsoft.com. To read about it, see Aptimize’s “how we did it” on its site. We spoke to CEO Ed Robinson about Aptimize’s SharePoint Accelerator, released this week—see what he said about SharePoint in the companion post at SharePointPro Connections. 

And if it took you more than seven seconds to load this page, I'd like to know about it! Send the load time written in ink on a twenty-dollar bill to Caroline at Penton Media in Loveland, CO. And thank you.