How accepting are Kiwis of slow loading websites?

Forums › IT Pro and developers › How accepting are Kiwis of slow loading websites?

NSM

10 posts

Wannabe Geek
Inactive user

#204364 28-Sep-2016 22:19

I’m not based on New Zealand myself, but I do have a question for all of you New Zealanders.

According to Google, people will abandon websites if they time more than 2 seconds to load.

I’m assuming many websites load pretty slow from New Zealand. With that in mind, are New Zealanders more patient about slow loading websites? or do you guys abandon more websites than the rest of the world?

My own blog take ~8 seconds to load from New Zealand, according to two online page loading performance tests I found. It loads everywhere else in the world in 0–4 seconds, so NZ [and AU] is pretty miserable in comparison.

But is it a huge problem? or are you guys so used to slow websites that it doesn’t matter?

1 | 2

BDFL - Memuneh
80652 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41042

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#1642154 28-Sep-2016 22:47

Probably like everywhere else in the world users will feel less inclined to visit/buy from slow sites.

New Zealand broadband is miles ahead of Australian services and with VDSL and fibre available to a large majority, speeds aren't a big deal. Large sites will have a local CDN (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly and others are available in country) or from Australia.

If you are looking for your site and you have no local presence then consider where your nearest server is - if it's in Europe then it's a long way travelling here.

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

Linux

12181 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 8475

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642156 28-Sep-2016 22:51

Our fixed line and mobile Internet is pretty top notch when compared to the rest of the world

gzt

18682 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 7821

Lifetime subscriber

#1642157 28-Sep-2016 22:52

If I'm searching on Google and I get 10 relevant results for a product or info on something, I will tend to open each hit and scan it rapidly for the relevant information.

A site that fails to load the key information in a second or so? I will usually leave the tab open and maybe come back to it - if the other results do not bear fruit.

Some of the slow loading sites are also really bad quality. Full of flashing ad rubbish or just shocking design. Many of these are slow and I will frequently close them without even looking and go somewhere else.

But you may not be getting the whole story from the stats.

If the site design is good then the key content loads first and quick. Win. The rest is optional.

So, your insane 8 second load time may not be an issue in practice ;. ). It could be but depends on the content and loading sequence.

But yeah also if that progress bar stays up too long there are other non-content issues with that I'll skip for now.

Linux

12181 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 8475

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642158 28-Sep-2016 22:55

Flashy ads on a website saying I am visitor 1 million and click here to claim your free prize / iPhone7+ I will close straight away

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
80652 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 41042

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#1642159 28-Sep-2016 22:56

Also consideration have to be taken in regards to where your main audience is and you have to locate your server(s) as close as possible to them, unless you are using a CDN.

And of course, less is better - less scripts, less CSS. More is also better - more cached resources.

On top of this you have to consider other things. Are you using HTTP/2 for resources? That will give you parallelism with a single connection, instead of HTTP/1 where parallelism depends on multiple connections. If using HTTP/1 then sharding is an approach, where with HTTP/2 sharding should not be used. And so on...

But back to your question, no one likes slow sites.

Everything is relative...

Referral links: Quic Broadband (free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE) | Samsung | AliExpress | Wise | Sharesies

Support Geekzone by subscribing (browse ads-free), or making a one-off or recurring donation through PressPatron.

timmmay

20858 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 5350

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642233 29-Sep-2016 06:50

Personally my tolerance is low. If a website takes more than say 5 seconds I've probably either left or hit reload, depending on how much I want to see the site.

Most sites load pretty quickly from NZ. Yes there's latency, but most sites use content distribution networks, so only a few resources have to come from say the US. I know my websites are all hosted in the USA, 150ms ping away, but I use CloudFlare so most of the website is loaded from Auckland, or Sydney, or one of the 100 data centers that's nearest the visitor. That took my website load time from 10s down to 2s, but it took quite a lot of time and effort to tune things like caching headers on the web server. When I set up my new sites on AWS/Nginx I spent a lot of time doing header rewriting, as some Wordpress themes don't do caching headers well.

Geekzone support

Support Geekzone with one-off or recurring donations Donate via PressPatron.

richms

29098 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 10209

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642260 29-Sep-2016 08:13

I also am not very forgiving of it. Worst are when you get people doing the self hosting carry on from a dodgey cheap VPS somewhere in the middle of europe.

If you tube can start 1080 or 4k video playing within a couple of seconds of clicking it, then there is little excuse for a website to take much longer than that to show me some text and still images.

Worst of all is laggy slow script loading. Get half way down scrolling the page and it all goes dim because some stupid lightbox popup has appeared at the top asking me to subscribe to their stupid mailing list. Thats usually an instant close the tab.

Richard rich.ms

kiwifidget

"Cookie"
3640 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1969

Lifetime subscriber

#1642286 29-Sep-2016 08:35

As someone who came from the era of dial up modems, I still delight in seeing webpages appear before my very eyes. Its a miracle.

Delete cookies?! Are you insane?!

richms

29098 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 10209

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642290 29-Sep-2016 08:43

kiwifidget:

As someone who came from the era of dial up modems, I still delight in seeing webpages appear before my very eyes. Its a miracle.

So did I, and when you have over 100000x the bandwidth available, and 100x less latency, there is no excuse for performance that is the same or worse than what happened with dialup.

Its sloppy web coding, using obsolete protocols and just not giving a crap that leads to 10+ second page loads these days. Technically there is no reason that anything should take that long. Just lazy web devs and cheap hosts.

Richard rich.ms

networkn

Networkn
32863 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 15453

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642292 29-Sep-2016 08:48

Our primary suppliers website is glacial, and it's been like that for 4 years. We hate it, but at the end of the day, we want what they sell.

richms

29098 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 10209

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642337 29-Sep-2016 09:01

networkn:

Our primary suppliers website is glacial, and it's been like that for 4 years. We hate it, but at the end of the day, we want what they sell.

Can you place phone orders? Start doing that, waste their time. They might learn.

Richard rich.ms

Mighty Ape

Shop now at Mighty Ape (affiliate link).

Behodar

11096 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 6075

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642348 29-Sep-2016 09:10

richms: So did I, and when you have over 100000x the bandwidth available, and 100x less latency, there is no excuse for performance that is the same or worse than what happened with dialup.

Its sloppy web coding, using obsolete protocols and just not giving a crap that leads to 10+ second page loads these days. Technically there is no reason that anything should take that long. Just lazy web devs and cheap hosts.

Absolutely. I was recently "criticised" for hand-writing JavaScript and CSS on a new site, instead of using jQuery and Bootstrap (as in "Why wouldn't you just use existing libraries? They're quicker and easier!").

The resulting site (all HTML, all CSS, all scripts, but excluding images) uses less space than the jQuery library alone. That is why.

The Website Obesity Crisis has some good examples of huge sites, including an article about "overweight" sites that comes in at over 3 MB itself!

Linuxluver

5833 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1639

Trusted

Subscriber

#1642349 29-Sep-2016 09:12

NSM:

I’m not based on New Zealand myself, but I do have a question for all of you New Zealanders.

According to Google, people will abandon websites if they time more than 2 seconds to load.

I’m assuming many websites load pretty slow from New Zealand. With that in mind, are New Zealanders more patient about slow loading websites? or do you guys abandon more websites than the rest of the world?

My own blog take ~8 seconds to load from New Zealand, according to two online page loading performance tests I found. It loads everywhere else in the world in 0–4 seconds, so NZ [and AU] is pretty miserable in comparison.

But is it a huge problem? or are you guys so used to slow websites that it doesn’t matter?

Depends on time and priority. If I NEED to the see the site, I'll wait.

But if the site is covered in pop-up ads or loads a video with a 30-second ad in front of the video I wanted to see..........I'm gone. I'll find another way.

_____________________________________________________________________

I've been on Geekzone over 16 years..... Time flies....

BlueShift

1692 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 969

#1642350 29-Sep-2016 09:13

richms:

kiwifidget:

As someone who came from the era of dial up modems, I still delight in seeing webpages appear before my very eyes. Its a miracle.

So did I, and when you have over 100000x the bandwidth available, and 100x less latency, there is no excuse for performance that is the same or worse than what happened with dialup.

Its sloppy web coding, using obsolete protocols and just not giving a crap that leads to 10+ second page loads these days. Technically there is no reason that anything should take that long. Just lazy web devs and cheap hosts.

Page-bloat is a definite thing - because we have all that speed, web devs don't have the incentive to keep things slim and trim.

Apparently the average web page today is the size of the original installer for Doom.

OTOH, those original olde tyme hand-carved plain HTML websites were uuuuuugly.

timmmay

20858 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 5350

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1642382 29-Sep-2016 09:18

Behodar:

Absolutely. I was recently "criticised" for hand-writing JavaScript and CSS on a new site, instead of using jQuery and Bootstrap (as in "Why wouldn't you just use existing libraries? They're quicker and easier!").

The resulting site (all HTML, all CSS, all scripts, but excluding images) uses less space than the jQuery library alone. That is why.

The Website Obesity Crisis has some good examples of huge sites, including an article about "overweight" sites that comes in at over 3 MB itself!

Set your caching headers and those resources are only downloaded once. So the first visit is a bit slow, but after that it's pretty quick. Add in a CDN for fast delivery of those libraries, and given most people are on broadband I don't think it's a huge deal any more. Smaller is better of course, but I'd be interested in how much real world difference it makes.

1 | 2