After how many seconds do most people abandon a web page?

How to get close to this number

Estimate this from your own behaviour rather than from any study. Think about how long you actually wait on a page that has not painted anything before you hit back — and be honest, because the answer is short. Any figure measured in tens of seconds is describing patience nobody has; any figure under a second is faster than most people can even register a delay. That brackets the answer tightly.

The counterintuitive part is that the threshold does not move much with connection speed. As networks got faster, expectations moved with them, so the tolerance has stayed roughly where it is for years rather than relaxing. It is a fact about human attention, not about bandwidth, which is why a slow page on fibre is punished just as hard as a slow page ever was.

This is the number that explains why this site is built the way it is. Static pages served from a CDN, no framework shipped to the browser, almost no JavaScript, and ad slots with reserved height so nothing jumps as it loads. Every one of those choices is buying margin against this threshold — and the ad rules in this project exist partly because the fastest way to blow through it is to hang a page on a third-party script.