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Dan Brubaker
15,084 PointsHow long should a website take to load?
For a simple website, what load time is expected?
For a complex website, how long is too long before some optimization should be considered? 5sec? 10sec?
4 Answers
Luke Glazebrook
13,564 PointsHi Dan!
I would say anywhere between a second and five seconds is acceptable to get a site loaded. Any longer than that and your, potential, users might be hitting that back button and going elsewhere.
As a general rule of thumb always try to keep your website as optimised as possible regardless of how long it takes to load unoptimised.
Hope this helped you out.
-Luke
Chris Hall
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 11,442 PointsPage load times matter, don't get me wrong. However putting an exact second on it is kind of subjective. Since load times are case by case dependent. A person could bounce if it takes too long to load on a desktop, while at the same time wait the exact same amount of time on mobile and look at the page.
As designers, and developers its best for us to focus on best practices when building out a site. So compressing of images with out quality loss, planing out an efficient design, and writing our code with DRY (don't repeat yourself) to name a few. After that we can focus on areas that might need some work to speed up.
Back to your general question. Some research has suggested sites that take longer than four seconds to load have a higher bounce rate.
Charlie Holmes
12,601 PointsIf you haven't checked Google's PageSpeed items out you might want to.
Dan Brubaker
15,084 PointsThanks! I'll check it out!
Dan Brubaker
15,084 PointsThanks for all the responses! Very helpful.