Acceptable Page Load Time: You Have 7 Seconds

Thanks to Ileane, I’m writing this post because of her recent question: How many it takes to make up “too many”?

This is highly important question, because I see there so many blogs overfulled with plugins, that make page load time up to 30-40 seconds. It is impossible to call such page load time acceptable.

According to the current topic, acceptable page load time is no more, than 7 seconds. It is too controversial though, but, let’s say, it is fair enough as well.

Why?

The Rule of «7 Seconds»

I have found this rule on webmasters’ forum under the topic: How many page loading seconds are acceptable?

The guy says:

My rule of thumb is that you have 7 seconds to sell a prospect that they have reached a page of interest to them. You don’t have to make a sale in 7 seconds, you just have 7 seconds to keep them for a while longer.
Here is the skinny, if your initial page takes 6 seconds to load, you have 1 second of selling time. If your initial page takes 1 second or less to load you have 6-7 seconds of selling time.

This is a good point to start from. Though, aim to decrease you page load time. Less, than 7 seconds would be acceptable enough.

Visitor’s Internet Connection Speed Also Matters

Plus – do not forget about the visitors’ Internet connection speeds.

If you have a speedy connection, then multiply your blog’s page load time twice. You will get the result of the page load time of those users, who have Internet connection twice slower.

Now take a look at the map of «Internet Speeds and Costs Around the World»

You can easily see, that U.S.A. has relatively slow average Internet connection speed, which means there is almost nothing to worry about for U.S. users. I mean that if you are from U.S.A. you can focus on yourself, when you want to optimize site’s page load time.

Detect & Optimize Page Load Time Using Only 2 Tools

I am speaking about Mozilla Firefox’s plugin «FireBug» and the great web service «WooRank».

Using WooRank to detect your site’s page load time:

This web service is extremely easy to use. But all you can do is to check your SEO details, including site speed. Although, it will give you the main idea whether you need to improve or to optimize anything or not.

1. Just type in your website’s domain name – e.g. example.com.

2. Follow the simple instructions:

Note: WooRank shows the time, when your page loads enough to read. But that’s not enough at the same time. There is always some extra time you should consider as well.

Using FireBug to detect and omptimize page load time:

Now this tool is the one you should be always using. It seems to be the best one for webmasters and bloggers, who want to achieve success in SEO.

Using FireBug you can detect:

1. Which scripts and plugins load time is not acceptable;
2. Which images take a lot of time to load;
3. What works well;
4. Compare performance of cached pages and pages without cache;

That’s it. No other tools or web services needed.

Acceptable Page Load Time Depends on the Type of Web Traffic

Yeap, your traffic vary by age, gender, character, profession etc. You can use Alexa’s service to analyze your site’s audience demographics. It will give you the approximate idea of what page load time you need.

In any case, the less – the best.

PS! Take a look also at these 2 articles on page load time and its optimization topics: Acceptable Response Times, Let’s Make the Web Faster – Google Code

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