The Digital Experience Platform blog covers the latest in innovative technologies to help you transform your business.
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WebCenter
February 12, 2013
The High Consequences of Poorly Performing Websites
I recently returned from a wonderful trip to the Dominican
Republic for a destination wedding where the skies were sunny, the temps were
in the eighties, and the hotel internet connection was slow and unreliable. From the point of view of those traveling
with me, the lousy connection was probably a good thing -- it prevented me from
checking in on work emails frequently and worrying too much about what was
going on back in the office. At the same time, however, it did leave me frustrated over the few online tasks I’d wanted
to accomplish while away that had to be delayed until I returned to the U.S.
where greater bandwidth and reliability awaited.
Offline in Playa del Macao, Dominican Republic.
This experience got me thinking about not only how much we’ve
come to rely on the online channel in our everyday lives, but also how
important high performance is when it comes to the online customer experience. After
all, the slow page load times and time-outs I experienced at the resort were
enough to make me drop my entire online agenda while on vacation.
The simple
matter is that it’s not enough to make your web presence available and hope for
the best. All site visitors are naturally impatient and rightly so. As a
result, you need to make sure that your web presence is finely tuned and super
fast and super responsive. Even small
dips in performance can have high consequences for your business and consumers
expect web pages to load at increasingly faster speeds. For example:
- Shopzilla decreased their average page load time from 6
second to 1.2 seconds resulting in a 25% page view increase and 12% revenue
increase1 - A 1-second delay in page-load time can result in 11% fewer
page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions2 - Amazon discovered that 1 ms of latency would cost
them 1% in sales3 - Google found that an extra ½ second in time for a search
page to load resulted in a 20% drop in traffic3 - Tablet users expect websites to load in under three seconds;
smart phone users expect pages to load in less than four seconds4
Many of you may be familiar with these statistics already,
but it’s important to note that high online performance is not only the concern
of online behemoths like Google and Amazon. It should be your concern too. That’s why we’ll spend this week on the WebCenter blog taking a closer
look at how to deliver high performance websites.
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