• The New York Times, Thursday, March 1, 2012 12:06 PM

Before adding that extra bandwidth-heavy bell or whistle to your Web site, we suggest reading this story in The New York Times about increasingly impatient Web surfers. These days, how long is too long for consumers to wait for various site responses? “Even 400 milliseconds -- literally the blink of an eye,” NYT tells us, citing new research from Google engineers.

Among other activities, “that barely perceptible delay causes people to search less. Every millisecond matters,” says Arvind Jain, a Google engineer, and, in NYT’s words, “the company’s resident speed maestro.” Given that time is money, therefore, Google and its rivals are always working to make their sites and services faster. Complicating matters, according to NYT, data-hungry smartphones and tablets are creating “frustrating digital traffic jams,” as people download all manner of content.

Jain and his peers, however, remain painfully aware that consumers will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a competitor by more than 250 milliseconds. Notes Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft: “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web.”

Read the whole story at The New York Times »