WE ARE all familiar with online frustration, but a new study from UK-based digital user experience company Cyber Duck has actually attempted to quantify the health impact of a slowly loading website.
The company created three different websites with a range of technical issues, and then hooked up 1,100 users to blood pressure monitors to see what happened when something went wrong.
The biggest impact on hypertension was caused by slowly loading pages, which showed an average increase of 21% in blood pressure, rising from 111 mm Hg before dealing with the website issue to 134 mm Hg afterwards.
The average page load times of the sites used in the study were between 8.8 and 10.5 seconds, with participants describing the speeds as "frustrating" and "excruciating".
Multiple pop-ups produced almost the same effect, with a 20% increase in blood pressure, while sites which automatically played background music were similarly bad for the subjects' cardiovascular system.
Auto-play videos weren't quite as bad, revealing a 16% uplift, while blood pressure rises were also induced by broken pages (17%), non-clickable call-to-action buttons (14%), hard-to-read fonts (13%) and images not loading (12%).
The results seem to indicate that rather than using Dr Google it's probably safer to just go and have a good lie down.
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 11 Dec 20
To see the full newsletter, see the embedded issue below or CLICK HERE to download Pharmacy Daily from 11 Dec 20
