The Importance of Site Performance
Nov 2nd, 2009 by admin
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.
Picture of The Importance of Site Performance [source:getelastic.com]
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).
Speeds 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 retailers 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.
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.
Margaret Rivera of Akamai will be joining us live tomorrow (November 4, 2009) 9am PST/12pm EST to share the results of this research along with tips on how to improve performance. You can sign up to attend the webinar, and all registrants who attend the live session will receive a complementary copy of the research.
In 2008, Internet Retailer conducted a retailer survey and found:
68% of retailers home pages load in under 3 seconds 43% load in less than 2 seconds 81.8% load in 30 seconds or less for dialup users, with 50.6% under 15 seconds 43.3% say the use of video, animation and AJAX has hurt site performance
77.3% monitor site responsiveness 9.1% engage in load balancing testing and content validity 4.5% measure application behavior
73% measure site performances impact in terms of lost revenue 59% measure lost traffic 43% measure the increase in call center and email traffic 27% measure the increase in negative customer reviews 21% measure the impact on customer satisfaction ratings 40% benchmark their performance against competitors
37% test home and product pages consistently using real-time reporting tools (26% test daily, 19% test weekly or monthly) 84% test various screen resolutions 83% test across different browsers and operating systems 16% test performance from different geographic locations or different times of day 16% record and replay specific user transactions 13% test performance of mobile applications 53% conduct testing before the holiday season
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 retailers platform.
Please join us for tomorrows webinar and learn how you can ensure a fast and consistent user experience. Bring your questions![source:getelastic.com]
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