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In Theory, E-Commerce Sites Are Way Too Slow. But Do Customers Care?
This is probably why homepages are getting bigger, even though smaller pages load faster. The average number of objects (images, buttons and, particularly, scripts) on a site rose 14 percent in 2011 to 98, from 86 objects in 2010, according to the Strangeloop report. Some of that is just clutter, but some comes from third-parties providing functions such as recommendation engines. Still more of it is for analytics and customer tracking.
If customers were actually abandoning your site in droves, you’d have good reason to go slicing away at the CRM, analytics and recommendations just to speed things up—after all, you can’t sell anything to a customer who has walked away. But there’s no evidence from retailers that customers actually jump ship as quickly as the theorists say they will—as long as customers believe there’s something worth waiting for.
Maybe the most surprising item in the Strangeloop report is that although more retail sites are using content delivery networks, that isn’t translating into quicker Web sites in front of users. According to the report, CDN use by retailers has grown by 17 percent. But sites using CDNs load on average in 10.058 seconds, while non-CDN sites have an average load time of 9.72 seconds.
Strangeloop figures the difference appears because the retailers using CDNs have bigger sites, or maybe they figure that with the improved speed of a CDN they can afford to have bigger sites. But that misses the point. A 10-second load time should be deadly, with or without a CDN. Clearly, it’s not.
None of that means looking for ways to speed up Web sites is a bad idea. Making sure customers aren’t waiting, say, half a minute for your site to load is certainly worth the trouble, especially if it’s due to one of those third-party services. And mobile-commerce sites still vary wildly in how long they take to load on a smartphone, which suggests there’s lots of benefit to be gained from some relatively easy tuning.
But fine-tuning to shave off a fraction of a second? Ridiculous. At this point, trotting out the same idealized numbers from a bygone mainframe era is pointless. The real wait that customers will accept today isn’t 3 seconds—it’s 10 seconds. Faster than that is nice. But until customers actually do start leaving after just a few seconds, E-Commerce sites have bigger problems to worry about.
-Marc
January 26th, 2012 at 2:28 pm
I love it when the data in vendor studies directly contradicts the conclusion, and thanks for call it out.
In the case of page load speed, while I am skeptical of the urban legands quantifing the effect of pageload (1 conversion drop per 100ms, etc…), I have seen a number of first hand examples of improved performance directly improving bounce rate and conversion. So my own experience tells me that speed is an important factor in customer experience… I just don’t believe it can be reduced to a simple equation.
I wonder if one of the problems with the data in the study is how tricky it is to measure page load speed as perceived by the user. Many of those sites with very large pages and long load times, are optimized to load asynchronously. So the first screen of content comes in fast, and content below the fold (and many of the scripts, tracking pixels, etc) come in after the fact. So it’s entirely possible that a consumer saw their first page of content in 3 seconds even though it took 9 for the “full” page to load.
If we’re talking about consumer behavior, then we should probably be talking about perceived load times, not measured load times.