As Tom Cruise famously says in “Top Gun”, “I feel the need… the need for speed.”

Well, these days, it seems like the whole world does. Whatever the reason for it – and I have my own ideas on it (which I will keep to myself) – lots of people are impatient. A velocity which would have been a-okay in the past is now cause for cursing and throwing things.

Just think about living in the old West in the late 1800s, finding something you want in the Montgomery ward’s catalog,  ordering it – by mail – and waiting a month for it to arrive.

Now we have the example of Amazon -not just the biggest online retailer. They are now the largest retailer in the world, having surpassed Walmart.

And they built that empire in part delivering a vast array of goods overnight. Oh year, and free shipping.

People don’t have time to wait in line, wait to get their purchases or wait for your website to load.

In our over twenty years doing online marketing we’ve watched this trend grow and grow.

Some of you remember the days of dial-up connections?  Seems like ancient times now.

It wasn’t that long ago that surveys started showing – you lose a measurable portion of site visitors, if the page took too long to load. That effect was measurable after 3 seconds, but it was small. WAS small.

I don’t think anyone thinks its small now.

Some time since, it became a major ranking factor for Google. As far as Google is concerned, your customers are probably looking at your site on a phone, and they expect things to happen on their screen RIGHT NOW.

It isn’t just the home page loading either. Moving from one page to another. Logging in. Checking out. Finding what you are looking for on the site. These are all pain points people can do without if they take at all long.

Increasingly intrusive security measures don’t help. We all understand why that is necessary and will be as long as we have a large criminal element. It can be overdone. I mean, an 8 digit authentication code, seriously?  Authentication required before a site will let you make a payment?  Come on, just take my money!

A personal gripe is required password changes which are known to be useless. So for cosmetic reasons we’ll all be inconvenienced.

In any case, you have to make your security measures as simple, clear, and easy as possible. Don’t put someone through goofy hoops to reset a password.

There’s plenty of things out of your control. If you look at all the points a command to bring up a web page has to go through – from your keyboard, to your computer, to your Internet service provider, maybe 20 way points before it gets to the server, then reverse that to show up on your screen. All places things can go wrong.

But you have to control what you can.

I don’t think the Need for Speed is going away.