We’ve been telling our clients for years how important page load speed is. Years ago, a study stated that you have 4 seconds to show a visitor what your website is about or they will more than likely use the back button on their browser to find an alternate source to supply their needs. Some get it, others prefer to have a twenty-image slide show without regard for their website visitors’ time or bandwidth.

Perhaps your website is slow, and you don’t even know it! Once you load your website onto your device it stores itself in your local machine’s cache, speeding up successive visits. We recently had an inbound SEO client whose site took 17 seconds to load. I personally had never witnessed one this slow. Websites that never loaded, yes but never one that successfully loaded so slowly. I had to double-check the speed from several sources to confirm that it was I was seeing was really a problem and it was. Still the client was unaware!

The bar has now been raised, or seconds lowered as it where to 3 seconds. See this great article and infographic by KISS Metrics using the link below.

Page loading time is obviously an important part of any website’s user experience. And many times we’ll let it slide to accommodate better aesthetic design, new nifty functionality or to add more content to web pages.