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Anorak News | The Quarter of a Second Rule for all websites

The Quarter of a Second Rule for all websites

by | 20th, November 2012

WE know. Anorak needs work. The tech is not A-grade. We need to improve. Traffic is being lost. Readers are let down. We’re not alone. Nicholas Carr writes:

Back in 2006, a famous study of online retailing found that a third of online shoppers (those with broadband connections) would abandon a retailing site if its pages took four seconds or longer to load and that nearly two-thirds of shoppers would bolt if the delay reached six seconds. The finding became the basis for the Four Second Rule: People won’t wait more than about four seconds for a web page to load.

In the succeeding six years, the Four Second Rule has been repealed and replaced by the Quarter of a Second Rule. Studies by companies like Google and Microsoft now find that it only takes a delay of 250 milliseconds in page loading for people to start abandoning a site. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” Microsoft search guru Harry Shum observed earlier this year. To put that into perspective, it takes about 400 milliseconds for you to blink an eye.

Dunno about tht. You need to cater for your audience. Here’s a typical Anorak reader:

 



Posted: 20th, November 2012 | In: Technology Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink