I picked up an interesting thread about the speed at which your site loads. Speed used to be a critical issue in the days we surfed with a 56kbps modem and a normal telephone line. Over the years, when adsl lines got popular, I guess we all seemed to be a bit less preoccupied with finetuning and downsizing our files, coding, scripts, images etc…But nowadays speed is back on the table.

That is at least the main conclusion after a speech Google’s Marissa Mayer made at the Web 2.0 conference. Speed is still one of the hit or miss elements of a website. I made this remark myself quite recently. Most of the state of the art web applications I’ve been using (Flickr, the new Microsoft Live Mail or Amazon.com to name a few), seem to have one thing in common: they’re a bit slow. And it is the “bit” that seems to bother me.

Marissa Mayer’s findings in this matter offer an interesting read and seem to confirm what I feel. While testing out some new features Google found out that half a second more or less made a world of difference. Or to be more precise: it meant a drop of 20% in traffic. Tech Trader Daily explains:

Mayer described an interesting experiment Google performed a few years ago. The idea was to figure out the ideal number of results to display in response to a search query. When Google asked users if they wanted 10, 20 or 30 results on the first page, the winner was 30. More is better, was the apparent thinking. But consumer behavior told a different story: the more responses Google displayed, the fewer searches each user performed. It was, she said, an indication of “extreme unhappiness.” But it was the opposite of what people said they wanted.

The question was why that was happening? In essense, Google figured out that the answer was speed: it simplying took a lot longer - too long - to display the screen with more results.

Mayer said she looked for an uncontrolled variable - and it turned out to be speed. Load times increased from 0.4 seconds for 10 results, to 0.9 seconds for 30 results.

A question of milliseconds made a difference.

More facts and figures here and here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Webdesign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.