Website Performance Trends That Impact Business

Success in today’s digital world means having a website that performs to customer expectations (bottom line). Today’s consumers want it all (right now) and that is especially true of a visit to your website. One bad visit and they may never return! I’ll touch more on that in a little bit.

First, here are a few website performance trends that could impact your business.

Trend #1: Users expect more.

According to AlertSite, in 2006, the average online shopper expected a web page to load in four seconds. Today, the same shopper expects a page to load in two seconds or less.

Think about it, if you are asked to choose between a fast or a slow site, which one would you choose? I know that I hate waiting, even for a few seconds, for a webpage to load! Because users expect more, it is critical that site performance (i.e. a fast loading time) is a primary feature.

If it’s been awhile since you checked under your site’s hood, there are several tools, like Pingdom, available to help test website and webpage speed.

Trend #2: Web consumption across the globe continues to explode.

Although these statistics are from June 2012, they do a great job of illustrating this trend. Your website needs to be functional locally, nationally, and internationally. Don’t be geocentric! Think globally!

Trend #3: More web apps are using real-time push notifications as a core part of the Web experience.

These connections require more resources than traditional request/response connections. Poor performance in this area will lead to a confused customer and lost revenue.

According to James Ward at Heroku, scaling the server-side of a real-time web application can be a serious challenge. Servers must now utilize techniques that move away from the typical thread-per-connection model. Why? This model is not able to handle the massive numbers of concurrent connections required by real-time web applications.

The Big Picture

Did you know there is a nearly 50% relationship between site performance and site abandonment? According to Akamai, every 10% decrease in site functionality leads to a 5% increase in site abandonment! Whoa!

Not only does page performance determine whether or not visitors hang out at given site, it directly influences their attitudes towards returning – 58% note performance as a key determinant as to whether they’ll visit again.

Burson-Marsteller Worldwide says that, on average, a highly influential Internet user relates a positive experience to 11 people, but a negative experience is shared with 17 people. Yikes! What’s ever happened to spreading the love?

Finally, many consumers who become frustrated with a website blame the retailer and not the Internet!

  • Boston Consulting Group reports that 28% of Web users do not return to a company’s website if it does not perform sufficiently well, and a further 6% do not even go to the affiliated retail store anymore.
  • When a site experiences an outage, 9% of online customers permanently abandon the site and 48% of site users establish a relationships with a competitor according to Jupiter Research.
  • Business Computing World states that, on average, businesses lose between $84,000 and $108,000 for every hour of IT system downtime.

How can you improve your website’s performance by focusing on the end user? Share in the comments below.

Image Credit: Risk.net

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