I recently stumbled across a blog post with this tidbit from a previous Web 2.0 conference. Google ran a user test to experiment with returning more than the usual ten results at a time in their search engine.

Google found that the half second needed to return the additional results killed user satisfaction, and caused a 20% drop in traffic. In spite of working in the load testing industry where page load time is king, seeing the real consequences of slow page load times drives home the point of “why page load times are important” in a very tangible way.

See Greg Linden’s blog post on this topic.

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