How quickly a merchant’s website opens can mean the difference between a sale and an antsy consumer who moves on to another site to satisfy his immediate needs. Unfortunately for many eCommerce merchants, their websites are not living up to consumers’ expectations, and they may be losing sales, new research suggests.
In a quarterly website report from Radware, the Web pages of the top 500 retailers not only are getting bigger, but they’re slower than ever. The median top-500 eCommerce home page takes 9.3 seconds to load, up 21 percent from 7.7 seconds a year ago, while 50 percent of the top eCommerce sites take 10 seconds or longer to load, according to Radware.
This finding suggests that half of the top 500 eCommerce sites have reached the previously identified maximum time (10 seconds) that a typical Internet user will wait for a page to load; the majority of online shoppers will wait only 3 seconds for a page to load before moving on. Among the top 100 eCommerce sites, the median load time is the max-tolerable 10 seconds, up slightly from 8.2 seconds a year ago.
Time To Interact Longer, Too
Another factor that could impact consumer website-staying time is the “time to interact,” or TTI, referring to how long it takes for a page’s primary content to load and become usable. The median TTI last year was 4.9 seconds; now it’s 5 seconds, suggesting close monitoring of this trend could be necessary to weigh its potential impact, the report notes.
Among the primary reasons websites are taking longer to load is Web pages are bigger and heavier, according to Radware. The median eCommerce page contains 99 resources, such as images and various files. The median page is 1,436 KB in size, 31 percent bigger than just a year ago, the report notes.
Best Practices Use Plateaus
In terms of core performance best practices, adoption seems to have plateaued. In spring 2013, 74 percent of the top 100 eCommerce sites used a content delivery network, and the percentage has grown now to 80 percent. Keep-alives have settled in at a 93 percent implementation rate, as has the 9 percent image-compression implementation rate. Use of progressive jpegs, a best practice that had fallen out of favor, is back on an upswing, increasing to 10 percent from 6 percent last year, according to the report.
“As 2013 had its share of website outages from Amazon to Healthcare.gov, we also see that site slowdowns can also cause a negative impact on brand perception,” Tammy Everts, Radware Web performance evangelist, said in a statement. “Slowdowns occur 10 times more frequently than outages, and over time, slowdowns can have double the negative financial impact as outages. This also has a major long-term impact on customer retention, as the permanent abandonment rate for a slow site is up to three times greater than the abandonment rate for a site that is down.”
For an infographic illustrating the top eCommerce website trends, click here.