Page response time matters even more now

I recently posted on the how websites need to be careful about their page response times and now it seems this has become a much bigger issue in the last couple of weeks.

Why? Well recently Matt Cutts, Google's Principle engineer, has mentioned that Google could well be factoring page response time in their organic search rankings in the future.

The impact of this change (ranking based upon how quickly a site comes back with a page to the user or the search engine spider) is that popular sites with slow pages could....

1. Find themselves pushed down the page in Google, etc. or even disappear from the first page entirely
2. Have to spend more on their SEO efforts or step-up their pay-per-click advertising to ensure they get prominence on the top of search results*
3. Have to spend more of their development and testing efforts on Volume & Performance efforts - in turn adding to project timescales
4. Bring hosting Service Level Agreements further into the spotlight

(*You try explaining to your boss why you're having to spend loads more on your Marketing budget because your site slipped down the results for key search terms)

So... with page performance becoming a more important factor, are you already measuring your page response times and comparing them against those of your competitors?

Page response times

Our work at Ideal Interface leads us to speak with many different clients who want a leading ecommerce website. So whilst specifying this solution we try to define the functional requirements (such as what interactivity the page needs to provide) along with the non-functional requirements... such as what the page download / response times should be.

Now... in my experience this actually takes some explaining to define what you actually mean and how you going to measure it before you are likely to get agreement from the client.

Firstly, its important to understand that all things on the Internet are definitely not equal. Connection speeds (bandwidth), latency, the browser you are using and the speed of your device all contribute to the differences between one user's experience and another.

Q: So, what is an acceptable page download time?

A: This depends on who you ask

For a long time I have used the words of Jakob Neilson, the web's foremost usability expert, who has tackled this subject several years ago. He gives the timescale for user attention between 1 and 10 seconds, after that user flow is broken and users tend to leave the site:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/timeframes.html

More recently, two seconds has been given by Akamai as the new average of an online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20090914005141&newsLang=en
(I guess you would expect this from a company who provide fast Internet delivery services!)

However, there is no doubt in my mind that a user's expectation of page download times is gradually increasing. So just because bandwidth speeds are increasing, there is no reason for site owners to increase page size accordingly (or to provide complex or badly-written client-side code that takes ages to render in the browser).