Even with a broadband connection, surfing the web can sometimes be annoyingly slow. Images, plugins, and Java effects, not to mention Flash, may make surfing fun, but they can bring surfing to a crawl. Waiting for a page to load can seem like an eternity. Now there’s a study that tells us just how much time we’re losing to bloated Web designs.

According to Tech.co.uk, the average Brit looses 2.5 days every year to slow-loading websites. At least half of them—surprise—were annoyed by waiting, with 7% taking out their web rage in the form of physical aggression.

But what’s really of interest to us as bloggers is this find: half of web users polled abandoned sites that took longer than 30 seconds to load and 25 percent won’t wait more than 10 seconds.

Take a look in your logs and see how many visitors abandoned your site after one page, and how many left within 10 seconds. Then look at your design and see what you can pare away.

If you get stuck, read this.

More and more these days I’m drawn to simple, clean, uncluttered Web design. See, for example, my WordPress theme, Upstart Blogger Minim.