If your Web site is slow, count on your visitors to click away elsewhere. By Jennifer Morris Not surprisingly, Web designers continue to try to cram all sorts of bells and whistles into corporate home pages and etailing sites. But a recent study of European Web sites raises questions about the wisdom of such cramming. What Mercury discovered would likely stand the hairs of any etailing executive on end. Some home pages in the UK, for example, took more than four minutes to load.
Oral surgery takes less time.
On the whole, Mercury found that Web sites for financial services companies were the worst performers in the UK, with an average load time of 5.8 seconds. In Germany, some portals took more than 30 seconds to load. Meanwhile, consumers in Lyon seeking virtual entertainment may want to consider charades. Web sites in the entertainment category were the slowest in France, according to Mercury. One speed demon took nearly three minutes to load.