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Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

E-commerce sites: You have 2 seconds to load your Web pages

By | September 14, 2009, 3:57am PDT

E-commerce sites have two seconds to load a Web page or consumers will click away. And after three seconds nearly all customers will split, according to research by Forrester and Akamai.

Akamai had Forrester conduct a followup to a 2006 survey. The 2006 survey found that 4 seconds was the threshold for Web page loading. Three years later that threshold has been halved.

Quick page loading is a big factor in loyalty for e-commerce sites. No surprise there. It’s also no surprise that Akamai—which sells services to speed up Web pages—is doing the survey. Nevertheless, the results are interesting.

Some tidbits from the 1,048 online shoppers surveyed:

  • 47 percent of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40 percent won’t wait more than 3 seconds.
  • 52 percent say quick page loading is important to their loyalty. In 2006, that tally was 12 percent.
  • 23 percent will stop shopping with slow page loads.
  • 79 percent of shoppers that get slow page loads say they are less likely to buy from that site again. Meanwhile, 64 percent just buy goods from another store.
  • 16 percent of consumers have shopped via a mobile phone.

You can find the full survey (with registration) here.

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Topics

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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Getting harder and harder
Spats30 16th Sep 2009
Web Development has taken a client-side route with
various JavaScript libraries (JQuery, JSON, etc.) that
need to be downloaded and parsed -- adding more time
to render a page.

Though, it's just best practice to make sure your
site's homepage loads fast-as-possible, even if not an
e-commerce site.

Other determining factors: ISP connection speed,
website host compression, modern browser, and IE user
vs. any other faster browser???

This is all basic web usability stuff.
0 Votes
+ -
Not in South Africa you dont
EgoDust 14th Sep 2009
If this was used in S.A. nobody would be able to
use the web. What Im trying to say is that
connections speeds still differ quite a lot around
the world. I would say realistically in under 8
seconds?
0 Votes
+ -
Getting harder and harder
Spats30 16th Sep 2009
Web Development has taken a client-side route with
various JavaScript libraries (JQuery, JSON, etc.) that
need to be downloaded and parsed -- adding more time
to render a page.

Though, it's just best practice to make sure your
site's homepage loads fast-as-possible, even if not an
e-commerce site.

Other determining factors: ISP connection speed,
website host compression, modern browser, and IE user
vs. any other faster browser???

This is all basic web usability stuff.

Join the conversation!

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