What would people consider to be an acceptable page loading time? we are working on a price comparision type site at the moment. If you go direct to the url of a product you are looking about 2-3 seconds page loading time however if you run a search for say 'black ipod video' it can take up to 8 seconds to return the results as we have over 3 million items in the database. Would people consider these times acceptable? its not the page size which is slowing things down it seems to be the link between the php and the database. thanks
8 seconds will be too long, people want their data and they wanted it yesterday. Consider perhapes a loading page like travelocity uses, great way to advertise other products as well.
the main problem we have is trying to make the site on a budget, the site will essentially be an affiliate price comparision script. our expertise is in the seo side of things, we can get tons of traffic easily however have very limited php skills so having to use a script called Afflistore to do the work for us.