Are you an impatient person? I am. I hate waiting in lines, I hate long traffic lights, and most of all, I hate waiting for pages to load on my computer. But what is the consequence? According to Arvind Jain, an engineer for Google, people will search for a site less often if they know it loads slow. Jain is a speed expert at Google and he explains people’s viewing habits:

“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,”

“Every millisecond matters.”

Just how much each millisecond matters has become a point of great interest for scientist at Microsoft. The results are surprising. Harry Shum, a computer scientist and search speed expert at Microsoft explains :

“Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,”

The following graph provided by The New York Times shows what a minuscule amount of time 250 milliseconds really is:

Here’s what Google posted on their blog site regarding their continued efforts to increase speed:

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web.”

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

So these statistics about page load times aren’t going unnoticed, the big guys are on it and they know how impatient we are. The world we live in today is about instant gratification. If you can’t eat it while you’re driving, we won’t buy it. If it’s out of stock, we won’t order it. If the page isn’t currently available, we won’t go back to it.

Whoever said patience is a virtue, was right, but it has also become a novelty and retailers and providers should take note. We don’t want to wait, if you’re slow, you’re outdated and antiquated.