eCom Tip of the Week: Load Times Must Be Under 2 Seconds

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Alicia Doiron

“Technology is amazing and nobody is happy” -Louis C.K.

If you think about it, the fact we walk around with mini supercomputers that didn’t exist 20 years ago is pretty astonishing. Back then these only existed in an episode of Star Trek.

But the sad truth is we’ve become highly desensitized to the wonder of technology. Ask Google a question and you have thousands of resources at your disposal instantly.

We’ve forgotten in the good old days we would have to go to the library and sort through books to find the answer we were looking for. This would take *gasp* maybe a whole day. But times have changed.

We all, including your customers, have to come to expect instant results, quite literally. Every second your site takes to load, means you can kiss sales goodbye. Current stats on the matter really drive this point home.

Taken from VoucherCloud, 57% of customers will abandon a cart if the page loads in 3 seconds or longer and what’s worse? 80% of those customers won’t return.

A study from Radware found that a 2 second delay during checkout boosted cart abandonment rates to 87%–20% higher than the average 67%.

A Kissmetrics study 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less

So what does this all mean? In order for your eCommerce store to be deemed acceptable by your customers, you’ve got to get that loading time under 2 seconds. Sounds crazy, right? But the data is there, so why do so many stores still not have a fast enough checkout?

Google themselves claim that “2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”

If you’re currently unaware of your speed, or not sure where to start, there’s some tools out there that can definitely help you out.

So what are you waiting for? Get that speed up today. Every second counts remember.