Study: 3 seconds can make or break e-commerce sites

MAHWAH, N.J. — Bulky, slow web pages will drive away shoppers.



According to a new study of the top 100 e-commerce sites from Radware, “State of the Union: E-commerce Page Speed & Web Performance Summer 2015,” 57% of site visitors will abandon a web page after just three seconds if they are unable to interact with the key content.



Only 12% of the top e-commerce sites are currently meeting customer expectations for both content and page speed, and 14% of top retailers take more than 10 seconds just to become functional (or time to interact, TTI), an increase from 9% in February 2015.



Additional findings from the report include:

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  Page size and complexity are common contributors to slower load times, impacting the TTI. The median page is 1945 KB in size and contains 169 resource requests. The median TTI is 5.5 seconds, which is considerably slower than users’ reported wait-time threshold of three seconds. The slowest page on the top 100 list had a TTI of 34.1 seconds.


• 
  Site owners have not implemented the latest core optimization techniques. Despite the fact that images comprise 50% to 60% of the average page’s total size, 48% of the top 100 sites received an “F” score from webpagetest.org for image compression.