Online browsing trends - Four seconds or your out …

November 15th, 2006

A recent survey by Akamai concluded that online shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load.

Of the 1058 people involved in the study, 75% of the respondants said they would not return to websites that took longer than four second to load. The time involved in order to load a page, came second to high prices and shipping costs in the online shoppers main gripes.

Akamai’s consulted a number of people who shopped regularly online to find out the best and worst aspects to online shopping, and what they liked and disliked most about e-retailing. The majority of the mature net-shoppers (who had been shopping online” for more than two years and spent more than $1500 a year online) ranked page loading times as their main priority.

It found that one-third of those surveryed abandoned sites that took time to load, were hard to navigate or took too long to handle the checkout and purchase process. E-Gain New Media recently put this theory further to the test by “streamlining” a well known PC manufacturers order process to co-incide with their UK SEO campaign, with spectacular results, with an increase of 140% in sales.

The four-second threshold is just under half the time of previous research (6 seconds), conducted during the early days of the web-shopping boom, which also suggested that shoppers would wait for a site to finish loading. With the advent of broadband, this perception is rapidly changing.

It should also be noted that roughly 30% of those survey said they formed a “negative perception” of a company with site was badly put-together site and would go as far as telling their family and friends about their experiences. Further research by Akamai concluded that nearly half of the top 500 US online shopping sites took longer than the four-second threshold to finish loading.

For the record:

The survey questioned 1,058 net shoppers during the first six months of 2006. Consultants Jupiter Research did the survey for Akamai.

Entry Filed under: SEO Industry