How fast is fast enough

Now speed is relevant for your score in Google, people are thinking about the necessary speed. On Seochat they state the following:

If your website's average loading time is below 9.82 seconds, your website is loading VERY fast as compared to the average websites ranking in Google at Position 1. You do not need to improve in this case.


Sorry, but even according to the old formula you are slower than everyone else. If you focus on people instead of on Google you should know that the loading time should be 1 or 2 seconds max. See respectively these articles from Jakob Nielsen and Akamai.

For this test Seochat used  stopwatch from numion.com and Google Chrome. I tested www.helenahoeve.nl several times with this stopwatch in several browsers:

• 1.9 seconds in Internet Explorer
• 0.7 seconds in Opera
• 1.8 seconds in Firefox
• 0.4 seconds in Google Chrome

So when you use Internet Explorer you browse roughly 4 times slower than tested. So the consequence is that a performance of 40 seconds should be enough for IE users? I don't think so...

I promise you, try to be faster than 2 seconds and you will reach much more people who will use your site.

Site Performance in a Graph

The faster your site, the more sites that are slower...

According to this Graph (based on Google's Site Performance) almost all sites are slower when your performance is 0,3 seconds.

% slower sites = 105 - 18 * site performance

Update 05-04-2010: At a regular base, I upgrade this graph, normally, it are minor changes. However today it seems that there is a real change in the graph (1.0s goes from 89% slower to 93% slower). The mentioned formula is not valid anymore.

Update 12-04-2010 From lifehacker.com I learned that at 1.4s 87% of the sites are slower (this was originally 81%).

Crawlstats versus Site Performance

Google introduced Site Performance. What is the difference between the Crawl Stats and the Site Performance. Crawl time is between the 0.2 and 0.4 seconds. The site is fast, except at the end of November. Strange. See this image ...