All men and women might be created equal, but the same does not go for web pages. Especially as online retail has become an essential part of even strictly brick-and-mortar brands, how well a retailer’s web page performs can have a major impact on sales.
Unfortunately, for non-retail brands, they’re getting lapped by online retailers’ faster load times.
According to Radware’s 2016 State of the Union: Multi-Industry Web Performance report, obtained by Internet Retailer, desktop sites representing eCommerce brands loaded, on average, a full second faster than their nearest competitors. Radware measured the time-to-interact — “the point at which primary page content renders and becomes interactive” — of sites from four different industries, and online retailers came out on top with a lap time of just 3.1 seconds.
News and media sites trailed in second at a leisurely 4.1 seconds, while travel and hospitality pages posted an identical figure. Ironically, sites related to sports — an activity some might associate with speed and precision — took 5.2 seconds to load all their relevant interactive content.
While industry-specific site loading times might be new information, the fact that longer waits mean lower sales is a fact as old as the Internet (so, not so old). Interestingly, not all consumers are ready to abandon their site searches at the split-second drop of a hat. Kissmetrics explained that while some online shoppers will always be ready to flee if their content isn’t ready immediately, abandonment rates taper off around the four-second mark. Though 25 percent of consumers will have already sought faster-loading pastures by that point, the rate slows considerably and doesn’t even reach halfway to 50 percent by the 10-second mark.
This might explain why online retail sites have managed to get their load times down to just about four seconds. Why pay more for IT costs if a good balance seems to have been struck? However, as Internet speeds get faster, consumers’ expectations will adjust as well, and if brands can’t supercharge load time, they’ll be left in the dust by competitors who can.