More than 10 seconds to impress? Now that’s tough!

“Your website has ‘less than 10 seconds’ to impress”, claims Paul Brent in his recent article on TheGlobeAndMail.com. He proceeds to describe how Complex2Clear, a Toronto company has rebranded itself to be able to “engage” a user within 10 seconds and turn that user into a customer. The rebranding has touched everything, not merely the website speed – but imagine that of those 10 seconds you have to impress and engage a potential customer five are wasted while the page is loads in the browser. That’s a scary thought. If “a bounce rate over 30 per cent is a signal that a company is likely doing something wrong with its web presence”, as mentioned in the article, a bounce rate over 70 per cent is catastrophic, and a slow loading page can very easily cause this kind of a catastrophe.

People do tend to “bounce” when it takes ages for a page to load up, and in terms of the World Wide Web “ages” last just a few seconds. So, if your page loads too slowly, you may never get a chance even to start engaging your user.