The New York Times spoke recently with some Google engineers and industry leaders on the role page speed has on impacting user behaviors. Some of the conclusions they come to are pretty stunning:

1. Even 400 milliseconds could be too long for some users to wait.
2. People visit sites less often if it is slower than a competitor site by more than 250 milliseconds.
3. Two hundred fifty milliseconds is the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web, according to Harry Shum, speed specialist at Microsoft.

Context matters: Mobile load times have a long way to go

Users expectations are getting shorter and shorter, and the mobile infrastructure is not built for that kind of speed.” – Tom Leighton, co-founder and chief scientist at Akamai

1. Sites on mobile phones take an average of nine seconds to load, according to Google.
2. Akamai plans to introduce mobile accelerator software to speed up the loading process.
3. Congress has opened the door for an increase in network capacity by allowing for the auction of public airwaves.

There are a number of ways to improve page load times on mobile devices that we will review in future articles, but one definite way to improve download times on mobile devices is simply to optimize the download speeds of the same site people are accessing via the desktop.

New York Times – For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait