This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colors, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that you have about 50 ms to make a good first impression with your website. Throughout, visual appeal ratings correlated highly from one phase to the next, as did correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. In a follow-up study, they reduced the exposure time to 50 ms. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each.

It takes about 50 milliseconds (ms) (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person.