{photo credit: young_einstein – cc}
Slow Website Load Time? – Your Website is Burning Down!
Your company website is on fire. It’s slowly burning down and you’re losing money. Each year we add more features, more traffic, more third party widgets – all contributing to slower website load times. And while website load times go up, America’s attention span is decreasing.
So what is average website load time?
{photo credit: nicoventurelli – cc}
According to a recent report published by Radware, the average time it takes for a website to load is 7.25 seconds. Unfortunately for the website masses, the average person’s attention span is only 8 seconds long, as reported by a 2012 Associated Press study. Further statistics indicate that 17 percent of page views will last less than 4 seconds. Smell the smoke yet?
>> What’s your website load time? Find out how you compare with our this Free Website Speed Test. <<
What’s causing my website to burn down?
Industry pundits predict that website load time will continue to rise over the next few years. Therefore, companies that are able to manage an increased amount of features, traffic and third party elements without slowing down will have a competitive advantage over companies who cannot.
Load times are expected to increase in large part thanks to the rise in global IP traffic, and the accompanying big data boom that is already starting to put unprecedented pressure on networks. In fact, Cisco reports as part of their Visual Networking Index that global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold by as soon as 2017. At that point Annual global IP traffic will reach 1.4 zettabytes per year, or 120.6 exabytes per month.
How do I put out the fire?
With global IP traffic on the rise, load balancing is one option that may combat expected latency issues. However, load balancing adds another aspect to the network path and another point of potential failure.
As load balancing spreads the processing workload across multiple computers, networks or servers, it is essential to monitor this process. Load balancing prevents one computer from doing all of the work and overloading and monitoring checks to ensure that the process is working correctly. This prevents bottlenecking—which reduces network congestion—and the proper website monitoring tools test for availability and uptime. Together they provide for a better overall user experience for your website visitors.
Simply put, if your website is too slow, you are going to lose business—which makes website speed optimization more important than ever.
Why you need a Website Fire Alarm
Website monitoring tools ensure your web pages are operating at peak speed. When slowdowns or performance bottlenecks are detected, the monitoring “fire alarm” sounds an alert informing your IT team of the impending inferno.
For more on how to bring website monitoring tools into your business model—and improve the customer experience in doing so—see Dotcom-Monitor’s Website Speed Monitoring software.
