External Service Delays May Be Costing You Web Traffic

I'm sure you've probably noticed this before, but I haven't seen anyone explicitly take on the issue, so I figured I'd jot a quick note about it. Ever go to someone's blog or a reasonably well known Web site and find yourself waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Until you finally either tire of waiting and move on or get an error indicating the page couldn't load?

More often than not, this kind of choke is being caused by a site being called by the site you are trying to reach. The increasingly widespread use of Web services, ad networks, third-party stylesheets and cloud storage is producing a bottleneck problem that I suspect is costing Web site owners a lot more traffic than they might be able to see.

Just this morning, I clicked on a blog link to a colleague's site and was faced with an interminable white space. I looked in the lower portion of my Firefox browser and there was the dreaded note: "waiting for mashable.com". My colleague's blog isn't hosted at Mashable, so presumably I'm waiting for something he's signed up for on that site to find its way to his blog so I can see it. I gave up and decided to write this instead. If I remember later, I'll try returning to his blog entry but the odds are he has lost my readership for today.

Keep an eye out for this stuff. Every browser will tell you what it's doing when nothing is showing or refreshing in its view. How many times do you see "waiting for" followed by the name of some site other than the server you're trying to connect to? My highly subjective experience is that doubleclick.net is perhaps the most widespread offender, probably not because they're doing more wrong but because they're used on so many sites that the odds of seeing them in that "waiting room" are pretty good.

If you operate or manage a site that uses external services, it's a good idea to visit your site from time to time to see what may be delaying your visitors' ability to enjoy your site and perhaps costing you traffic. Your log files can help, too, of course. But the experience of waiting is one you should understand from your visitors' perspectives.

I'm just sayin'.