If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, shoppers are likely to abandon it, a survey suggests.
The research by Akamai revealed users’ dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up.
It found that 75% of those questioned would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.
It found that one-third of those questioned abandon sites that take time to load, are hard to navigate or take too long to handle the checkout process.
The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.
To make matters worse, the research found that the experience shoppers have on a retail site colours their entire view of the company behind it.
Do they think our attention span is dimin…Wha! What was that?
Indeed, and in just two or three short years, cascading style sheets will be usable without needing to learn browser hacks, as the number of systems shipped with Vista will finally remove enough copies of IE6 from the web that it will no longer be the dominant browser.
Four seconds is kind of extreme; I have to wonder if a broader statical population had been surveyed if a sufficient number could not load a page in four seconds and drive the wait time up, slightly. But one need have little experience with web site administration to also appreciate that business’ frequently dig their own graves through poor planning or simply being cheap. Scan the support forums of any shared hosting service in Pakistan and you will find outraged “businessmen” complaining about the loss of revenue and public good will caused by the latest service outage to hit their $2.95 a month unlimited shared web host.
I often leave retailer websites, money in hand, over website issues. A slow-loading site is certainly a consideration. And there are many other bone-headed design issues.
My favorite is the site whose home page is absolutely dependent on Flash. Sony.com is a perfect example.
… oh, but I’ll wait 4 seconds, maybe even 5 seconds. 🙂
Often, It’s the adservers that are sucking.
ask anyone who works in video or animation, 4 seconds is a long time. think about it: a TV commercial can deliver an entire theatrical story in a 15 second spot.
and as the web continues its march toward supplanting television as the king of entertainment media, the web will face the same set of expectations from generations of people raised on the instant gratification of the boob toob.
I don’t like Flash, and slow web sites bother me a bit, but my issues are mostly with function and navigation. Or the fun folks who demand that you Register when you try to put something in a “cart”, and then take you to never-never-land in the process, making you backtrack and find the product you wanted again…. (I usually vanish….)
Or there was the $800 sale that a certain un-named retailer lost when I wasn’t able to add a product to their cart at all….
But, OTOH, I was looking to buy a $500-ish TV one evening when the live human clerk at Sears looked at the one on the wall that I pointed to, and said “we don’t have any”. “OK, fine, what do you have?” “I don’t know…. I’m going on break now.” I went to Best Buy….
Or the time I visited Circuit City and couldn’t get a live human’s attention. (Best Buy again….)
Regards,
Stu.
The four-second threshold is half the time previous research, conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading.
What better indication of “broadband” penetration into the market?
I haven’t used dial-up service in about 5-years, but it seems like 4-to-8 seconds per page load was the norm, if not “pretty snappy”, back in the day…
The article does remind me of how irritating the sites are which load the banner and … make… me… wait… before they load the rest of the page.
No bandwidth slowdown, they’re just trying to force me to look at their ad…
As if I’m going to buy anything from that retailer!
“Yeah, make me stare at your company’s name, so I have it burned into my brain who it is I’m never going to buy anything from….” 🙂
Don’t trust Akamai. Their CEO came straight from MIT on the basis of tracking data without users knowledge. What people have to ask themselves is how Akamai got a hold of this information.
I have called them. They couldn’t even give me a straight answer as to what they do ( NSA ???)
It’s the ridiculous amount of Flash on many popular web pages nowadays. Try loading that on dial-up. Heck, try loading that on a budget broadband.
Just a note, John — this website took 14.84 seconds to come up.
You might look at your own site response time.
And it’s true that I wouldn’t wait that long for a shopping website )if they’re that slow online, imagine how slow their delivery will be!).
2 seconds… that’s all I’ll wait.
I want my fibre to the house.
Wait until the ADD/ADHD generation have grown up… IS IT THERE YET???… IS IT THERE YET???
I’ll usually wait much longer then 4 seconds. It usually depends on how badly I want to see the site though.
Poorly laid out sites are the biggest problem. If I can’t find the sales info I need / want then I’m outa there. I don’t mind a couple of clicks, but I don’t like suddenly seeing several windows open or making too many clicks to get somewhere.
This has nothing to do with attention spans getting shorter. This is just getting back to something reasonable.
Back in the 70’s programmers wracked their brains to cut tenths of a second off green screen load times because the standard way back then was 3 seconds!!!
The early GUIs and them the slow Web caused a ridiculous lowering of expectations. We’re finally getting back to where we were 30 years ago.
I have to wait longer, I’M STILL ON DIAL-UP!
30% of internet users still have dialup because broadband is unavailble or too expensive. ($60/mo for a 256k line in some cases.)
I try and stick with the simple websites that load faster. They get my money.