Slow connections
When a page takes over a second to answer, people click again.
Try it here
Pick how long each click waits, then press “Add to basket” on the shop page. Count the loaves that end up in the basket.
Why should I care?
On a slow connection, a heavy page never shows up. People leave before it loads.
- 24 millionpeople in the US lack fast home broadband.
- 1 in 3adults in homes earning under $30,000 go online only by phone.
- Everyoneon a train with one bar of signal.
What to do on your website
- Show at once that a click landed.
- Make a second click do no harm.
- Keep pages light: every megabyte is someone’s money.
More, if you want it
Check your own website with this tool
This is the button you’ll drag.
- Make sure you can see your bookmarks bar, the row just under the address bar. If it isn’t there, press Ctrl + Shift + B, or ⌘ + Shift + B on a Mac.
- Drag the Slow clicks button up into that bar and let go.
- Open your own website and click Slow clicks in the bar. Click it on any page and every click waits 0.4 seconds before it happens. Click again for 1 second, then 3, and once more to switch it off.
This works on a computer, in Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge. Phones and tablets have no bookmarks bar, so there are three other ways below.
On a phone or tablet
iPhone or iPad, from the Share button
- Copy the tool:
- Open the Shortcuts app, make a new shortcut, and add the action Run JavaScript on Web Page. Paste the tool in place of its sample script.
- In the shortcut’s details, turn on Show in Share Sheet, and name it Slow clicks.
- Once: in Settings, open Apps › Shortcuts › Advanced and turn on Allow Running Scripts.
- On your website in Safari, tap Share, then Slow clicks.
Android, from Chrome’s address bar
- Copy the tool:
- Bookmark any page with the star, then edit that bookmark: name it gc slow clicks and paste the tool in as its address.
- On your website, type gc slow clicks in the address bar and tap the starred bookmark it suggests. Choosing it from the bookmarks list won’t work.
Use it later, on a computer
Send yourself the link, or a reminder for tomorrow morning. Both are made on your phone and sent nowhere else.
Get all 10 tools in one go
One Good Citizens folder with every tool in it. Download the file, then bring it into your browser:
Download the bookmarks file- Chrome: Bookmarks › Import bookmarks and settings › Bookmarks HTML file
- Safari: File › Import From › Bookmarks HTML File
- Firefox: Bookmarks › Manage bookmarks › Import and Backup › Import Bookmarks from HTML
More free tools: Fovea, Color vision, Aging eyes, or all 10.
Why this matters
Picture a customer with one bar of signal pressing “Pay” on your website. Nothing happens, so they press it again, the way you’d push a shop door a second time when it sticks.
On fast office Wi-Fi, a page answers before you have finished moving your hand. For a great many people it does not. Beside this, every click waits before anything happens. Try each delay and notice what your hand wants to do while it waits.
A tenth of a second, a second, ten seconds
Under about a tenth of a second, a response feels instant. Under a second, your train of thought survives. Past ten seconds, your attention wanders off.
Those three limits are usually credited to the usability writer Jakob Nielsen, but he was summarising1 work by Robert Miller in 1968 and by Stuart Card and colleagues in 1991. In 1982 two researchers at IBM, Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadani, found that programmers got twice as much done2 when the computer answered in 0.3 seconds instead of 3: about 371 transactions an hour instead of 180.
When the door doesn’t open, people do the natural thing and push again. Companies that measure websites even have a name for it, the “rage click”. On a slow connection, that second click can order twice, pay twice, or send your customer somewhere they did not mean to go.
Most of the world’s web is slow
According to the International Telecommunication Union, 2.2 billion people6 are still offline, and 96% of them live in low- and middle-income countries.
Having a signal at all is not the main problem; price and quality are. In nine of ten low-income countries, a modest 5-gigabyte mobile plan costs more than a tenth7 of a month’s income. Every heavy image is paid for by the person who downloads it.
It is close to home, too. In the United States, about 24 million people lack fast home broadband, including 28% of rural residents, and among households earning under $30,000 a year, about one adult in three9 is online only through a phone. And everyone has had one bar of signal on a train.
What the famous statistics really say
You may have been sold speed with some of these numbers. A few are weaker than they sound, and it is worth knowing which.
“53% of mobile visits are abandoned after three seconds” comes from a 2016 Google report3 built on its own analytics data, with no published method. “Every 100 milliseconds costs Amazon 1% of sales” is a former engineer’s recollection4, not a published study. The direction they point is supported; the exact numbers are not.
The firmer targets today are Google’s Core Web Vitals5, its three measures of how a page feels to use: the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and nothing should jump around while it loads, all measured for three visits in four.
All the advice, in full
Answer every click at once
Show that a click landed within a tenth of a second, with a pressed state or a small spinner on the button itself, even if the result takes longer.
Make a second click harmless
Disable a button after the first press and make the action safe to repeat on the server, so an impatient double click never orders twice.
Show progress for long waits
For anything over about ten seconds, show how far along it is. In a 1985 study, 86% of people preferred a progress bar even when it saved no time.
Test on a slow connection
Set a performance budget and test on a throttled phone connection, not office Wi-Fi. In Google’s 2016 tests, the average mobile home page took 19 seconds to load on 3G.
Treat page weight as the reader’s cost
Compress images, send small ones to small screens and drop what you do not need. For many people, every megabyte is money.
Be honest about loading
Placeholder “skeleton” screens help some people and not others: one study found they felt slower than a spinner. Keep them quiet, and never fake progress.
Works on prototypes too
This tool changes how your clicks and taps land, and it catches pointer presses as well as clicks, so it works on prototypes that are drawn as a picture, such as a Figma prototype link, as well as on live pages.
A few apps listen for presses in ways no bookmark can reach; if nothing changes when you click, the app is one of them.
What people get wrong
- IBM proved a 400-millisecond threshold
- Doherty and Thadani’s paper compares 0.3 and 3 seconds and says productivity rises sharply below one second. It does not name 400 milliseconds.
- Nielsen discovered the 0.1, 1 and 10 second limits
- He summarized research by Robert Miller (1968) and Card, Robertson and Mackinlay (1991).
- The problem is coverage
- Most people live within reach of a 3G signal or better. The barriers are cost, quality and devices.
- Skeleton screens always feel faster
- The evidence is mixed. In one test they felt slower than a plain spinner.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page comes from one of these 11 sources. The small numbers in the text point here.
Guidance
Response times: the 3 important limits·
Nielsen Norman Group
Report
The economic value of rapid response time·
IBM
Vendor data
The need for mobile speed·
Think with Google
Article
Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0·
Geeking with Greg
Guidance
Web Vitalsweb.dev
Data
Facts and Figures 2025·
Report
Global Connectivity Report 2025: affordability·
Report
Broadband deployment report·
Survey
Internet, broadband fact sheetPeer-reviewed study
The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces·
CHI ’85
Article
A bone to pick with skeleton screens·