Back in 2006 over 1,000 web site shoppers were surveyed by Akamai Technologies about how speed affects their online shopping habits. They found the following, “if a shopping web site took longer than 4 seconds to load, 75% of the participants would NOT return to that particular web site.” – http://www.eugeneloj.com/2006/12/the_user_attent.html . This was 2006, imagine the attention span today! I tell clients you have under 2 seconds to make that first impression with your web site, or it could be game over.

We had a client contact their web hosting company because we had been having some serious issues with their web site not responding in an acceptable mannor.  Once we found out that Google was experiencing the same problems through their webmaster tools, it was mission critical to get this web site cranking.  The client’s hosting company told him that it was ok, as long as it didn’t over 3o seconds to load.  30 seconds. Wow.

30 Seconds would be enough time for me to:

- Get a cup of coffee
- Let the dog out.
- Buy a new book from Amazon on my Kindle
- Fire up a song on my Ipod
-  Check out what shows I want to watch tonight on my DVR
- Text my wife and ask “what’s for dinner”.
- Suggest to my wife that we go out because if I eat salad as an entree one more night I’m going to change into a rabbit.
- Apologize to my wife for that last comment and buy some flowers online.

You get the idea.  I don’t have much patience off line let alone online and neither do your clients, prospects or Google.  Don’t make Google wait for your web site to load as it could be penalizing your organic and PPC search engine compaigns, don’t complain to your wife about dinner and don’t make it that much more difficult to get new customers.  If your web site is loading slowly on a multiple amount of computers, it’s time to discuss quick options with your hosting company.  30 seconds is not acceptable, nor is 10.

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