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Wait A Minute, Akamai, With Your 2-Second Page Load Report
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September 23rd, 2009
Akamai recently published a study saying consumers lose patience with E-Commerce sites that take more than two seconds to load. The September 14 report, based on an Akamai-commissioned survey by Forrester, received a good deal of media attention. But the conclusion—that sites that used to have to load in four seconds now need to load twice as quickly—is not only not supported in the report itself, but it doesn't make any sense given the complicated reality that is today's Web.
Nobody will argue that when it comes to page display rates, the faster the better. However, we couldn't help but wonder about the accuracy, and meaningfulness, of the report. Did anybody actually measure how many seconds passed before an E-Commerce consumer clicked away from a retailer site? It seems hard to believe that somebody interested in shopping at, say, Macys.com would flee in a huff to Kohls.com if the Macy's site didn't load before three seconds had passed.
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2 Comments | Read Wait A Minute, Akamai, With Your 2-Second Page Load Report
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
September 24th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
If we could get to the stage where sites load in 4 seconds, let alone, 2 seconds that would be awesome achievement. The most import message from their message is that page load speed is important – and really important for ecommerce sites – people won’t wait to give you money – right?
About 2 years and some customer feedback from visitors that my websites were slow – I launched into finding out why, i’m not a techie but I know I hate slow websites. I was shocked to discover that in countries where I do the most business (US, UK, AUS) my sites were taking waaaay longer to download, memorably 34 seconds in the UK. The interesting learning for me was that while my site loads fast for me, it loaded at different rates all around the world dependent on the distance form the customers browser to the server where my website/s was hosted (factor called ‘latency’).
What I did: got in the ‘expert’, cost me a lot but made a big difference to my page load speed – my ‘expert’ moved jobs and I went looking for a solution that I could turn on and would automate making my websites faster and, you know, there was very little out there (though things may have changed I did this piece of work over 12 months ago). I decided on the website accelerator from Aptimize and it does everything for me.
The result: i now get feedback from other people asking me how my sites, with all their images, load so fast – traffic up by 15%, page views up by 31%, newletter sign-up 17%, sales up 9%.
Don’t assume everyone (your potential customers) is experiencing the same page load speed as you – because they are not.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
As a consumer, I am stunned by the number of servers that must respond to my request to view a vendor’s website. When any one of them slows everything or even stops it (Waiting for …) I definitely move on.