Study: Even millisecond delays impact customer engagement, revenue

The user experience is critical to e-commerce success, a factor that makes snafus in Web performance unacceptable.



Performance is so critical that even a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. Meanwhile, a two-second delay in Web page load time increase bounce rates by 103%, according to the “State of Online Retail Performance,” a report from Akamai Technologies.



The study represents one month’s worth of anonymous user data from top online retailers, equating to approximately 10 billion user visits. The report was previously issued by SOASTA, which was acquired by Akamai in April 2017.



According to the report, half of consumers browse for products and services on their smartphones. However, due to poor Web performance, only one in five complete purchases using those phones. Currently, 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.



Bounce rates were also highest for mobile phone shoppers, while tablet shoppers had the lowest bounce rate, the report said.



“Results from our State of Online Retail Performance report have shown that user experience is critical to e-commerce success, and things aren’t getting any easier,” said Ash Kulkarni, senior VP and general manager, Web experience division, Akamai. “Customers have extremely short attention spans, and degradations in website performance — no matter how small — can cause consumers to go elsewhere in an instant. Sharing our findings about performance gives online merchants the actionable data they need to stay competitive.”