Om Malik’s article on Facebook Instant Articles caught my attention when he mentioned that from a large sample of Chartbeat data:
…57 percent of mobile users and 72 percent of desktop users [webpages] load within the first 8 seconds, and 12 percent and 8 percent, respectively, take longer than 20 seconds.
Eight seconds sounds like a ridiculous amount of time to wait for a webpage to load. The advice I’ve always gone by is from Google’s server response time guide which suggests a response time of 200 ms or less.
Malik goes on:
Facebook is right: Most of these pages take way too long to load. In 2004 Google pointed out that people are happy to wait about two seconds before getting frustrated with the page load. There is some latitude on mobile, but as LTE proliferates, people have less tolerance for slower page downloads.
Which again goes against Google’s advice of “making a page render in under a second on a mobile network”.
I agree, faster page load times should be the goal. I’m too familiar with pages that take seconds to load.