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Nov 2, 2009 | 2 minute read
written by Linda Bustos
Site Performance: The Need for Speed
In a 2006 study on site abandonment (.pdf) conducted by Jupiter Research on behalf of Akamai, 28% of online shoppers claimed they would not wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load before leaving a site. This equated to 33% of broadband customers and 19% of dialup. Though broadband customers had higher expectations for page load speed, even 45% of dialup users were unwilling to wait more than 6 seconds for a page to load.
Online power shoppers who spend more than $1500 online are more likely to demand fast loading pages (55% vs. 40% of shoppers who spend under $1500 per year).
Speed's Impact on Loyalty - Online and Offline
Faster sites attract more repeat visitors and customers. 64% of dissatisfied online shoppers said they were less likely to visit a slow retailer again, and 62% were less likely to purchase from the site again. 48% would purchase from a competitor, 28% would hold a negative perception of the company, 27% would tell a friend about the bad experience and 16% reported they would be less likely to visit a retailer's offline store after a bad online experience.
For all these reasons, Jupiter and Akamai concluded you should shoot for a 4 second or less page load.
It's 2009 - What's Changed?
Akamai teamed up with Forrester Research earlier this year for a follow up study and found online shoppers have even higher expectation for web performance -- and poor performance has an even bigger impact on customer loyalty. For example, nearly half of consumers do not want to wait longer than 2 seconds for a page to load.
How Do Online Retailers Currently Stack Up?
In 2008, Internet Retailer conducted a retailer survey and found:
Do Online Retailers Monitor Performance?
What Do Online Retailers Measure?
What Do Retailers Test?
The Internet Retailer article also suggest retailers retailers should test the performance of new page treatments (including A/B testing) and custom applications they add to their ecommerce platform or web hosting service before full roll out. It reminds us that the features and functions may work fine in the environment in which they were built (design and development firms having top of the line systems), but differently when installed on the retailer's platform.