For a long time now, people have been clear that your website needs to load in less than four seconds. Anything longer and chances are you’ll lose than.
The problem is people have been saying this for a really long time. Well over a decade; before high speed broadband at home became standard, or the prevalence of mobile and tablet based browsing.
We need to forget this outdated adage. If I’m on a site that take more than two second to load I get impatience.
And I do like to build sites to match my own impatience. 😛
Seriously, aim for two seconds. With proper speed optimisation and image compression it’s very possible to achieve – even on WordPress.
It’s better for your customers, it’s better for your server and of course way better for search engine optimisation.
It’s also good to enter a build process with this as a self-imposed restraint. When you client comes to you with 24 MBs of images they want displayed on the homepage they will more than understand if you reply:
Great looking photos, and I while we can certainly find a place for all of them on the website somewhere – I like to make fast sites that your customers will love.
You’d be hard pressed to find a client that doesn’t agree with you there.