“Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life, but even the patience of the brothers was being tested by our slow Internet.”
FATHER DANIEL VAN SANTVOORT, Cistercian monk, on his Welsh island community’s decision to get broadband. Source
I’ve writtenseveral times about the need to have an efficient website, which can run fast enough for everyone to use. However, I guess some people didn’t get the message, and have caused the Monks to run out of patience.
We’ve talked in the past about optimizing your web site so it runs a quickly as possible. This is nice of course as no one wants to wait for your pages to load. And with so many people having high-speed internet access, people’s desire to wait has gone down. (High speed access isn’t a license to triple your page size!)
We’ve also pointed out how Google is using your page load time now as a factor for where to rank your “pay-per-click” adwords ads.
Well now a new surveyhascome out that says that many (about 35%) of the people who don’t have high-speed internet, choose to not have. They don’t see the need for the speed, or higher costs.
So when you are sitting at your office, or home, and zipping along on you web page, remember that a large number of people will see your site load 3 to 5 times slower. So if that 10 or 20 second load time is driving you nuts, remember that others might see it in 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
If you want to know how your page responds to a variety of users, feel free to give me a call. I would be more than happy to offer a free consultation on how to improve your website.
Walter Wimberly has been helping small businesses get started on the Internet for over 9 years. This blog is to help people and small businesses learn from the experiences that I've gone through with others.
Image via Wikipedia
