Website loading speed - How slow is too slow?
I run a free email notification service for slow-loading websites ( https://cwviq.com/). At the moment, I am sending out alerts anytime the loading speed is slower than 5 seconds but would like to check with the community here what they think is a slow-loading website - is it 5 seconds? 10 seconds? Or more than that?
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10+ seconds. However, this can change if it's just other elements on the website that take more time to load. For example, if a section in the footer takes 30 seconds, that might not matter because it'll take close to a minute before I even get there.
Also, does your app also alert users if it's slower on phone vs desktop, or depending on the browser? Would be interesting to get more segmented data.
Thank you. 10 Seconds is where I started, but then I started wondering if someone would actually be happy with, say, a 9 or 8 second loading time. So, have it set tentatively at 5. Maybe would leave it for the user to decide in future.
Right now it's rather basic - crawling the sites once every few hours. I plan to make more customized crawls based on device, multiple geographies, etc. once I gain some traction.
Valid point. So, right now, I am capturing data related to page loading (in a general sense) as well as the Core Web Vitals (CWV) - so the user can dive in deeper and fix things, if required. I should probably add more intelligence into the system in future so it can give deeper insights instead of just the data.
For me, I'm skeptical of a website if it doesn't load within 2 seconds, or so.
This is my feeling as well. In most cases I will wait for 10s, but everything above 2s increases my skepticism. So I'd say that near instant makes me trust a site, waiting makes me trust it less. And when it's at 10+ seconds I'm either on a government page or spam, I would never input into into it unless forced.
Overall page can take more time, that's not a problem.
But initial part of page should be very quick, around 1sec..otherwise it is considered as slow.
Firstly, the average attention span of internet users is short, and they expect websites to load quickly. Therefore, if a website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to abandon it and look for alternatives. Based on this, a website that takes more than 5 seconds to load can be considered slow.
I'm working on something similar, a product to monitor web performance.
According to google the response time should be around 200ms.
I think more then 1s is already too much like it had been said here...
When you are coming from outside and it is an unfamiliar website… 1 second is already too long. Especially for the younger generation. There are studies that show a majority of (young) people hit the back button when the page hasn‘t loaded after 1 second.
Aiming for under 2 seconds is best but the tolerance changes depending on the amount of content and functionality the site contains. As the complexity goes up, I think people are more understanding of longer load times and it becomes about how gracefully you load the content. YouTube doesn't do great on performance tests, but it has to load a lot of content and does so with good loading states and without having much layout shift, so it still feels good.
Anything over two seconds is a problem (time to Interactive).