Website performance is critical to maintaining customer attention and completing online transactions, because a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7 percent, according to the latest State of Online Retail Performance report published by Akamai Technologies, Inc.
The data, gathered by SOASTA (now part of Akamai), represents one month’s worth of anonymous user data from top online retailers, equating to approximately 10 billion user visits. The team applied data analytics to generate insights into the intersection of IT, business, and user experience metrics.
Half of consumers browse for products and services on their smartphones, while only one in five complete purchases using those phones. The study showed that a two-second delay in web page load time increase bounce rates by 103 percent. Fifty-three percent of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Bounce rates were highest for mobile phone shoppers, while tablet shoppers had the lowest bounce rate.
"Since my days as Executive Director at Shop.org I have seen how e-commerce businesses are impacted by performance challenges, yet struggle to identify and treat the root cause,” said Scott Silverman, co-founder of GrowCommerce and the Global e-Commerce Leaders Forum. “This research clearly shows the link and provides a methodology for retailers to systematically assess and address those issues."
The report is rooted in the e-commerce market’s ongoing drive towards faster web performance. Online retail benefits from delivering better customer experiences, especially on mobile devices, and the State of Online Retail Performance report offers insights into what makes a superior online buying experience. The report identifies ways that high-performance web pages are different from poorly performing pages, looks at third-party scripts and other outside factors that can impact performance, and provides the reader with practical, actionable guidance on how they can compete in an ever-changing e-commerce landscape.
“Results from our State of Online Retail Performance report have shown that user experience is critical to e-commerce success, and things aren’t getting any easier,” said Ash Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager, Web Experience Division, Akamai. “Customers have extremely short attention spans, and degradations in website performance – no matter how small – can cause consumers to go elsewhere in an instant. Sharing our findings about performance gives online merchants the actionable data they need to stay competitive.”