E-commerce sites are some of the worst performing as a category, even though availability and performance directly impact their bottom line. This is according to the annual State of Web Readiness report by Load Impact, the cloud-based, on-demand load testing tool.
The surprising finding that e-commerce sites perform well below expectations, and often with profound performance issues, are the result of data collected from over 5 000 performance tests and surveys of more than 500 Load Impact users in 190 countries.
“E-commerce sites spend substantially more on performance testing than other categories, yet 68 percent of our survey respondents said they’ve experienced Web site performance or stability problems in the last 12 months,” says Ragnar Lönn, Load Impact founder and CEO.
“That’s amazing, because we know from other public research that there’s a direct correlation between increased latency and decreased customer satisfaction.”
Data from the Load Impact research found that the average time it took to load a page on an e-commerce site was almost 8 seconds while other sites had average page load times between four seconds and 5,5 seconds.
“A second here or there doesn’t sound very important, but according to our survey respondents, those few seconds can mean the loss of money and visitors,” says Lönn.
Forty percent of e-commerce respondents to the Load Impact study reported losing money in the last year due to performance issues, compared to only 25% of sites in other categories.
Other highlights from the report include:
* Sixty percent of companies overestimate their site’s capacity to handle user traffic;
* Ninety-eight percent of e-tailers thought sub two-second response time was desirable;
* Low latency, while important for all Web sites is crucial for e-retailers; and
* Very few respondents load test the mobile versions of their sites.