The loading time of a website has long been considered a crucial factor for performance. For an e-commerce store, loading time is an element to be monitored carefully. Indeed, because users’ patience is increasingly reducing, they prefer faster sites. If your page does not load fast enough for your visitors, they will go elsewhere. Find out why a faster site makes more money.

Less speed, less visitors, less revenue

To have a slow website is to enter a vicious cycle. It has already been proven that a delay of just milliseconds on an e-commerce store can cause major loss in revenue. Ask Amazon, which saw a decline in its sales of 1% due to a latency of 100 additional milliseconds. Why? Because a slow website upsets users.

In white papers dating from 1999 [*], the American group Zona Research had already identified that a website that took more than 8 seconds to load lost a third of its visitors. 10 years later, in 2009, a study carried out by Forrester Consulting with Akamai Technologies [**], made it seem that the new threshold was of only 2 seconds. “Two seconds is the average time expected by a user for a page to load. 40% of visitors will not wait more than 3 seconds before leaving.” We are so impatient.

The effects of lengthy loading time on an e-commerce site

There is a correlation between the number of consumers that leave your website and the time it takes to load a web page. Based on the data just mentioned, Peer1.com tried to create a mathematical model that would allow measuring the loss of visitors based on the loading time, and to better understand how much revenue was lost. Starting with the basic premise that people begin to leave the site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load, they modeled the loss in the form of an inverted exponential curve.

Visitors begin to leave after 4 seconds of loading time and they all leave if the site takes more than 30 seconds to load (actually 99.9% because it is an exponential curve). With this model, a website that loads in 8 seconds, receives 1,000 visitors per day with a conversion rate of 2%, and an average of 100€ in sales, loses 600€ per day (6 sales) or 18,000€ per month! How about you, how much money do you lose because of the slow speed of your site.

[*] Zona Research, Inc edited a White pages that is available at this address: http://www.webperf.net/info/wp_downloadspeed.pdf

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