Report shows consumers won’t wait long for web pages to load

Looking to market your products or services online?

You’d better make sure your website loads fast because a new report shows e-commerce buyers won’t wait around for long. The survey from Digital.com asked 1,250 online shoppers how long they typically wait for web pages to load before abandoning a website and their intended purchases.

Fifty-three percent expect the page to load in three seconds or less, and 21% say slow-loading pages are their biggest gripe when shopping online. Half will simply abandon their shopping carts if pages don’t load fast enough, the report said.

Drilling down deeper, 19% of online shoppers say they’ll abandon a web page that takes longer than two to three seconds to load, and 8% will leave after one second.

Those numbers don’t surprise Burt Flickinger, managing director for the retail consulting firm Strategic Resource Group.

“This is critically important because people are looking at hundreds of screen images a day,” he said. “And taking eight seconds to load a page might prompt them to scan for something else to look at.”

Digtal marketing executive Huy Nguyen agrees.

“In today’s digitally-connected world, where many people have access to high-speed internet at home and on the go through their mobile devices,” he said. “It’s completely reasonable for consumers to expect a quick and easy online shopping experience.”

Businesses should take heed because recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show online sales represented 13% of the nation’s total sales during the third quarter of 2021. And SmartInsights predicts that e-commerce sales in the U.S. will grow to 23.6% of all sales by 2025.

Other top sources of dissatisfaction in Digital.com’s report include security concerns (20%), unclear site navigation (15%) and websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices (15%).

These days, most consumers have their noses buried in their smartphones or laptops at home, at work, at the beach and just about anywhere else you can imagine. That online focus can be intense. And sometimes  dangerous, according to Flickinger.

“It’s almost analogous to someone crossing the street when there are cars, trucks and everything else coming and they don’t look up,” he said.

Other top sources of dissatisfaction in Digital.com’s report include security concerns (20%), unclear site navigation (15%) and sites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices (15%).