If you think the Internet has gotten fast over the last ten or so years, then think again. Web users are gobbling up web speed and asking for more, this according to some research done by Google. One of the Google engineers on the project, Arvind Jain, says that according to their research, the average web user is so impatient, they will barely wait one second for a web page to load.
The research gleaned these insights from the thousands of random websites the team tracked. It also seems that web users not only want faster speeds in terms of webpage load times, but they also want that speed to be within the eye-blink range of milliseconds. The team found that many websites that took 400 milliseconds more time than others to load saw people exiting the website or performing less activities on the site while sites that were faster by even 250 milliseconds did much better by retaining users longer.
“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. “Every millisecond matters.”
These findings get even more bizarre when Jarvin notes that the difference between load times across different websites plays a huge role in whether or not these websites compete effectively for visitors. Ideally, a difference of 250 milliseconds faster is all it will take for a user to opt for a competitor’s website.
These barely perceptible speeds may seem hard to comprehend but the lightening-fast brainwaves that shoot around in our minds are demanding similar speeds in the real world. The best-of-the-best speed sites on the Internet today are Google and Bing, both of which deliver results in under a second. But with average global speeds peaking at 6 seconds and 3.5 seconds in the US, the quest for speed-of-thought speeds is still a very long way off.
