Admit it – you hate slow websites, too. So, if you’ve got a slow-loading site, then expect people to hate it, too. But why exactly do we hate slow sites?
Back in the early days of the Internet, websites literally took forever to load, and people didn’t complain (or if they did, they suffered in silence). People waited patiently for web pages to load and occupied themselves with other things until the entire page appeared on their screens.
Nowadays, when people land on a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, they impatiently click on that back button or close the tab altogether.
Here are some reasons why people hate landing on slow sites:
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There are far too many choices
There are billions of websites on the Internet. If one site is slow, people will just head on over to the next site. Why bother waiting when another, much faster website offers pretty much the same information? It may seem like we’ve all become entitled to getting our way, but this is the sad truth. We’ve become spoiled by the sheer number of choices we have and the speed by which we can access those choices.
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Waste of your visitor’s time
Time is precious. Every second we wait for a page to load is time wasted. You can’t take time back. Once a second’s passed by, it’s gone. We want to make the most of our time, so when we encounter slow sites, it feels like that site is not respecting our time.
So, we leave that site and look for another one that will value our time. This is especially true if we’re looking for time-sensitive information where a few seconds can literally mean the difference between life and death or success and failure.
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Waste of their money
Most people who’ve got a cap on their data aren’t happy with slow websites. This is because slow websites consume their bandwidth. If they go beyond their allotted bandwidth for the month, they get charged extra. If you were in their position, you wouldn’t be happy too.
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Bad user experience
A slow site leaves a bad taste in your customer’s mouth. People click on your link because they want to go check out your content, but since your site is taking forever to load, then they’re not going to want to stick around. They wouldn’t even want to come back for a second visit.
