What is good site loading time?

[steveschmidt85]

Can anyone tell me what is ideal site loading time?

[innominds]

If you can get a loading time less than 4 seconds, then it is surely a good thing.
However, a lot depends upon the size of the webpage.

[keyon]

I'm glad you brought this up. Lately I've been especially annoyed with how slow some websites are loading -- like up to 10 seconds with some sites (I'm on a fairly common connection --3.5 Mbps). It strikes me absurd that a web developer would even put something out there that is so un-user friendly.

For example, I just checked out CNN.com (using pingdom.com) and I see that its load time is nearly 7 seconds --- to load 208 images, 240 objects, and 12 scripts -- and that's just the homepage.

Is it just me? Or are these websites being naive about what the real user experience is like on the other end?

Personally, I wouldn't put anything up that takes more than 3 seconds to load. If I've got more stuff to shove in front of my visitor's faces -- I'll break it up into separate pages.

[deepsand]

Can anyone tell me what is ideal site loading time?
Outside of "zero," there is no such thing as an ideal.

[deepsand]

For example, I just checked out CNN.com (using pingdom.com) and I see that its load time is nearly 7 seconds --- to load 208 images, 240 objects, and 12 scripts -- and that's just the homepage.

Is it just me? Or are these websites being naive about what the real user experience is like on the other end?
It is just you; most are not quite so impatient.

One's expectations are conditioned by one's experiences.

[LD]

At certain times, pages load in the blink of an eye. Other times it reminds me of dial-up on an average day. Mind you, when I'm sharing the bandwidth with "the gamer", "the iPod" and another user working late, things slow down a bit too.

[yesjia]

i think we can't use CNN's as a standard, as people has more patient with high trust websites.

[steveschmidt85]

If you can get a loading time less than 4 seconds, then it is surely a good thing.
However, a lot depends upon the size of the webpage.

thanks i was searching for this recommended time.

[webmaisterpro]

It is not only the loading time that it matters. Check Google webmaster tools, so you can see how your website is performing compared to other websites. For example Yahoo itself is a heavy website. Also check information related to cooking free domains, expired headers, static content and js and css compression.

[deepsand]

thanks i was searching for this recommended time.
Then you are looking for a quick and easy answer, rather than the correct one.

There is no ideal other than zero.

What you should really be looking at is how well your pages perform relative to those of your competitors.

[jassicacute]

There are different loading time for different sites.it depend upon sites content, bandwidth, site structure and how many requests it send to render the page.But It Is considered to have aload time 3-4 sec. is enough.

[deepsand]

There are different loading time for different sites.it depend upon sites content, bandwidth, site structure and how many requests it send to render the page.But It Is considered to have aload time 3-4 sec. is enough.
For many, 3-4 seconds is physically insufficient.

There is no magic number.

[deepsand]

It occurs to me that no one has acknowledged the fact that there is no single test criteria, that much depends on the user's bandwidth and platform.

[LD]

Mind you, when I'm sharing the bandwidth with "the gamer", "the iPod" and another user working late, things slow down a bit too.

Definitely the time of day matters when we're sharing bandwidth within our "user area" but also on premises when many users are each taking a slice of the pie. I know when the resident gamer is playing COD, the PC activity light never, I repeat never, stops flashing - and there are slight, but noticible lag times. However, that can also be affected by programs running in the background on ones machine. I've upgraded ram, motherboard and CPU, which is significantly better than the previous dual core machine, but it still lags a bit now and then. I'm just impatient I guess.

[craigmn3]

Perhaps we should then redefine the question to be. what is a good page size (graphics and code)? At or a bout 100kb.....larger? smaller?

[keyon]

It is just you; most are not quite so impatient.
The time I waste waiting for a page to load is only one of the problems -- a partially loaded page often has a disjointed layout, which means my clicks aren't really hitting where I think I'm clicking. More often than not I'm inadvertently clicking on a sponsored ad (that's still trying to load its image) -- and that means I've just wasted some advertiser's money, and generated some revenue for the website. Hmmm.

On second thought, about 3MB / page sounds good.

[deepsand]

The time I waste waiting for a page to load is only one of the problems -- a partially loaded page often has a disjointed layout, which means my clicks aren't really hitting where I think I'm clicking.
That's not necessarily the fault of the file being loaded; in fact, it's very much platform dependent.

The more heavily one's machine is loaded, the greater the behavior you describe.