Dive Brief:
- E-commerce sites have the fastest websites across four industries, though even those sites have significant room for improvement, according to new data from Radware.
- Radware studied the website speeds in the e-commerce, news and media, sports and travel and hospitality industries, industries that rely on daily online performance for revenue.
- Recent surveys from Akamai and Gomez.com found that almost half of users expect web sites to load in 2 seconds or less.
Dive Insight:
Users look for fast and efficient websites in almost any industry, from news to e-commerce. A fast website is especially important for companies that rely on their online sites for daily revenue. While a fast website can help a company gain and retain customers, slow sites can alienate the usually unforgiving user. Almost 80% of online shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won't return to the e-commerce site, according to surveys from Akamai and Gomez.com.
Radware found the critical element in a company’s website is "time to interact" (TTI). The time it takes to load all items on a page was significantly less important than TTI. Just 24% of sites had a TTI of 3 seconds or less.
The e-commerce sites Radware examined averaged a TTI of 3.1 seconds. Amazon.com was the second fastest e-commerce site after Mercado Livre, an eBay-owned Brazilian online marketplace.
The top news and media sites had a median TII of 4.1 seconds and sports sites were even slower.
Things like too many images, excessive JavaScript requests and too many requests of the server were common speed bumps for the sites studied.