This is not a list I would want to be on if I was heading up a Fortune 500 company.
Look at United Technologies on the graphic below. One has to snicker at the irony of a company that develops technology for the aerospace industry yet has a slow website.
Sad!
[Click for larger image, via Mashable]
Load times are critical on the web. I know John and much of the 8BIT Community are big evangelists of sites/blogs loading quickly. I know if I had to wait nearly a minute for a site to load, I’m out of there before it finishes.
Do you analyze the speed of your site or blog for your church or ministry?
52 seconds!? Who in their right mind would let a site take that long to load? I try to aim for no more than 5 seconds.
Along the lines of load times, here’s a can of worms: churches having a full Flash website, with no non-Flash version. Thoughts?
I wonder how the lack of an HTML site will affect church and ministry websites with those using devices like the iPad and iPhone that don’t support flash.
I do not check the load speed on the site that I manage, but I do check the time the user spends on the site. It’s usually an average of 2-5mins.
With Google beginning to count load time in their rankings, we all need to take an inventory of our site load times. I just spent a month going through my site cutting the load from 8 seconds to just over 2. I don’t know if that will translate into improved rankings from Google, but it should make my site visitors happier.
I didn’t know Google started factoring load times into rankings. That’s an important piece of info.
What would you recommend for testing the speed of the website? I know John took a look at or website a while back and though it was too slow. How can I change that? Do I jus need a new host? Recommendations?
I use a stopwatch for those sites haha.
No for real though, Firebug & Safari’s “Inspect Element” have tools to tell you how fast a page loads. they’ll help you see problem areas, like javascript took 7/8 of load time, is there a problem.
You might also try tools.pingdom.com. They provide a resource like the “inspect element” feature, but they load independently of your internet connection. I found their results to be very consistent with Google Webmaster Tools’ site performance results.
Cool. Thanks guys. I’ll give those a try.
The thing slowing most church websites down are all the animated gifs.
Oh man… I’ve got one on my blog. Only one… and it’s for cloversites.
I’m a big fan of the original Geocities animated gifs! (I kid… I kid…)
I guess I need to get rid of that mailbox with the flying letter I use for people to send me email!
I honestly do not know how you can have a load time of 52 seconds and not be bothered by that.
Craziness.
I get annoyed with something that takes 2 to 3 seconds to load.
What kind of connection are they using… dial-up on sleeping pills? I went to many of these web sites and didn’t see any of these numbers. I am using 768 Cable and all of them loaded in less than 5 seconds. This graphic was made to sell aptimize’s service to double the speed of your website. However it did make me check the load time of our site. It was under 3 seconds. I think that is great.
My church’s cloversite which launches on 5/24 takes 4 seconds. That’s pretty good I suppose! It’s flash and is a little weird upon load… it’s trying to be “graceful” or something. haha
Does Clover do HTML mirrors for SEO purposes?