A 100ms website delay can turn away customers

Website performance is critical to maintaining customer attention and completing online transactions, research from Akamai indicates.

The company’s latest State of Online Retail Performance report finds that a mere 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%.

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 increases bounce rates by 103%. More than half (53%) 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 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.