In a world where users have become more and more demanding, us developers, have to come up with strategies to please our users. Long loading times, network problems and website errors are no longer tolerated. Long are the days where a page could take its sweet time loading and the user would wait, because “that’s how it is”. Nowadays patience is thrown out the window and slow websites are quickly forgotten. So, how to deal with this? Should you focus solely on speed and discard design all together? Or should you stick with heavy images because it looks prettier? Is there a middle ground? If there is, we are about to find out.
First of all we have to understand how slow loading times affect our webpage. In studies done by Akamai.com and Gomez.com almost half of the users expect a webpage to be loaded by the 2 second mark. No only that, but if the page isn’t fully loaded by 3 seconds, they tend to abandon it. Let that sink in, nearly half of the internet’s user base will abandon a page that has not loaded in 3 seconds. You can lose a potential client in less than you can say “Wait, don’t go!”. This statistic shows that loading times matter, and they matter a lot.
If your web page is in the danger zone past the 3 second mark, don’t worry, there’s still hope for you. There are various tools and techniques to help you reduce your page’s loading time. Some techniques are common like GZIPing your site or having your CSS and Javascript files load from external files. However there are some more obscure techniques that could help you out. For example it is better to resize your images yourself than to let HTML do it. It is faster and more secure. You could also cache every time you can. Some content managers will cache the latest version of your page and display that to the users, drastically reducing loading time.
Some of you may say, “I have a loyal user base that doesn’t care if my page is slow.” Well congratulations on getting one of those, heard they are quite rare. However your user base may not care about your page’s loading time, but Google does. That’s right, Google cares about slowness. Google’s algorithm takes loading time into account. It is fair to mention that it takes it into account along with 200 other factors, but optimizing your page is the smart thing to do.
Last, but not least, what to do if your page relies heavily in video, let’s say, like Youtube. Loading times affect streaming sites the most, especially large ones with huge amount of traffic. Youtube has come up with a great solution for these situations. They do what they can to reduce loading times, but they have given the user more than optimization. They gave us snake. Youtube implemented a simple game of snake in their player for when the video is taking too long to load. This is a brilliant concept because not only does it take little to no resources, but it gives the user something to do while they wait, effectively taking their minds off the loading time. It is not, by any means, the solution for every loading time, but it a way to work around the problem when loading times are inevitable.
So do the smart thing and optimize your page. Short loading times give a better user experience and it affects your Google ranking. A page taking too long can even make you lose thousands of potential users. All in all, just ask yourself, would YOU be willing to wait 10 seconds for a page to load?
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/
Alejandro Rosas.
No comments:
Post a Comment