5 Seconds Load Time Is Not Acceptable. But It’s The Norm.

How Fast Can Things Really Be?

This is not a technical article, so let’s just glide over a few fundamental and understandable numbers and compare them to the real world.

A cheap CPU in a low-cost phone can process billions of instructions per second x at least 2 cores (essentially 2 processing units).

Reading data from modern disk drives is in thousands of megabytes per second - again, even on a low-cost phone.

Transferring over the internet is on the low-end hundreds of megabytes per second.

The Comparison

Let’s take the slowest product first. A high quality web page right after loading might be, on the bigger side, 15 - 25 megabytes.

Which means that all counted, you should enter the link in an open web browser and see the website in about 1 - 2 seconds - fully loaded.

If we take an app on your phone, it is files stored on your device, therefore no internet connection (the slowest speed) applies here. With speeds of gigabytes per second, you should see a typical app open and working in 0.15 - 0.25 seconds.

In an open app, program or a website, an interaction goes through only the fastest speeds of CPU and sometimes GPU. You clicking a button should have literally immediate visible results on your screen.

Current Real World

In current reality, it’s not always possible to reach those speeds. But as you can imagine, going from 1 - 2 seconds to 5 seconds of load time is not necessary either and your website can still open in 2 - 3 second. And that’s for really large webpage that is missing a good optimization.

What To Ask Your Developer?

No need for you to understand technology and coding in detail. This is not for making a tech interview.

The Stack

Start with a question “What is your stack?”. That question is asking what are the tools and technologies they are building with and building on. If the developer starts telling you about all the cool technologies they use, that is a red flag. Same if they say things like “webview”.

Why? Because the largest part of today’s slow software is building on something built before and that is built on something else built before. It’s a chain. Which means that all the speeds mentioned above, still valid, have to process not your project, but many layers.

WordPress is slow, because it’s doing everything even if you don’t need it.

Measuring

Second question is to ask how they measure the speed. And what are their speed targets.

Surprisingly many developers say that 5 seconds is the target. That is another red flag. Same if they don’t have a proper answer for how they measure - or if the answer is “we open it and see”.

Seeing with your own eyes and feeling it is a necessary part of testing. But it’s also the root for many “it works for me” issues.

You Should Start Requiring Speed Metrics

It is more work to make your project properly. But not as much as you may think.

Small projects (like single-page websites) have no measurable work difference between starting fresh and using pre-existing tools. Large projects require careful planning, weighing the pros and cons, and knowing why to use so-called frameworks.

Part of your product specification should not be only how the product should work, but also how fast it should be. It is a very important discussion to have.

From our practice, we understand that for a non-technical person, this is an uncomfortable conversation. That is why we at LINK-V walk our clients through the process in language they understand. After all, software is the layer between a human and computer and if we make the software, we act the same way.