Summary:
The text and links below all support these following statements;
- Web site visitors are impatient
- Web site visitors are not loyal
- Fast loading web pages are judged to be significantly more interesting than their slower counterparts; speed is king
- It's hard / expensive to squeeze more speed from the network - look outside the box - speed can be gained cheaper by site optimisation
- Slow web sites make a poor return on investment
- Site optimisation only takes place when visitors complain. Most visitors can't be bothered to complain
- Site visitor statistics tells you more than visitor feedback
- Although load times are important for all web services, for ecommerce it is absolutely crucial. Long delays prompts visitors to go to different sites with similar offers
Consumers Will Quickly Abandon Slow Websites; Compuware / Gomez)
(Website here)
2010: An independent study tells us that nearly one-third of consumers will start abandoning slow sites when the delay is between one and five seconds.
84 percent are only willing to try a slow performing website a few times before giving up.
39 percent say speed is more important than functionality for most websites, while only one in five rank greater site functionality as more important<
Stoyan Stefanov, Yahoo! Inc.
(Online Presentation)
Google; 0.5 second slower resulted in a 20% loss in advertisement revenue
Yahoo; 0.4 second slower resulted in a 5-9% user loss before complete page loaded
Amazon; 0.1 second slower resulted in a 1% customer loss
How a Slow Website Impacts Your Visitors and Sales
(Website here)
A good write-up by Peer1 hosting
Publications by Ron Kohavi
(Website here)
Documentation and studies related to web experiments and end-user behaviour
2007: Experiments at Microsoft on Live Search showed that when search results pages were slowed by 1 second 1% of the visitors left, 2 seconds delay meant 2.5% loss
Boosting Online Commerce Profitability with Akamai
(PDF here)
2006: Akamai / Forrester / Jupiter Research found one-third of broadband users are lost if the website takes more than four second to load. Broadband users are more impatient than dial up users
A study on tolerable waiting time: how long are Web users willing to wait?
(PDF here)
2004: A study by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah at the University of Nebraska claims that tolerable wait times (TWT) have decreased to just two seconds
THE NEED FOR SPEED II
(PDF here)
2001: User patience levels have constantly decreased over the years. Zona research established that one third of the visitors are lost if the site takes more than eight seconds to load
The Economic Impacts of Unacceptable Web-Site Download Speeds
(PDF here)
1999: Revenue lost by slow response times on the Internet was estimated "... $362 million per month, perhaps as much as $4.35 billion in ecommerce sales in the U.S." Even a one second time savings in download speeds can have large and significant impacts on user loyalty, use, enjoyment, and commerce.
Emerging Trends in the WWW User Population
(PDF here)
1996: A survey made by Pitkow and Kehoe indicated that the most widely cited problem with using the world wide web was that it took too long to load web pages (i.e. 69% of respondents cited this problem)
Updated 9th of September 2013