How long will you wait for a website to load before you give up and go somewhere else? Ten seconds? Twenty seconds?
Apparently, nearly half of us won’t wait even three seconds.
If a shopping website doesn’t load its content within that time, many of us are so impatient we’ll immediately jump ship.
And that means a lot of lost business for the online slowcoaches.
According to research from digital performance measurement firm Dynatrace, just a half second difference in page load times can make a 10% difference in sales for an online retailer.
Yet retail websites around the world have actually been getting slower over the last year, not faster, says Dynatrace, despite the general increase in connectivity speeds.
Why?
“It’s mainly because of all the third-party connections to Google, Facebook and Twitter,” says Dave Anderson, the tech firm’s vice president of marketing. “These, and chat functionality, are slowing things down, particularly for Australian sites.”
This is because data travelling between the US and Australia have to cover huge distances, causing a delay, or latency.
