Load Times Impact Conversion by 7 Percent

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:15:00 GMT

According to a report by Aberdeen Group (sponsored by Gomez), a delay of even one second can impact conversions by seven percent, page views by 11 percent and customer satisfaction by 16 percent.

Aberdeen found the average company achieved 97.8 percent availability for their business critical web applications, which roughly equates to eight days of downtime and arguably lost revenue. Additionally, according to Gomez’s web performance benchmarks for the month of November, 20 percent of the 700+ home pages monitored are at risk of underachieving Aberdeen’s stated 5.1-second response time threshold.

I have found that many organizations have limited understanding of their end-users' online experience. Aberdeen suggests this is because organizations are unable to externally monitor web applicaiton performance and optimize it for multiple browsers, whereas I believe it's an awareness and cost issue. Those that do have the expertise though, according to Aberdeen, are nine times more likely to report decreases to mean time to repair, four times more likely to reduce labor cost as a percentage of IT spend, 88 percent more likely to improve customer satisfaction and twice as likely to improve brand reputation. It certainly sounds like something we should all be watching out for, doesn't it?

“Aberdeen’s new study provides concrete, quantifiable evidence that improving web application performance can positively affect the bottom line,” said Matt Poepsel, Gomez VP of performance strategies. “However, it’s clear that for many businesses across many sectors, there is still a lot of work to be done.”

Gomez and Aberdeen analyst Bojan Simic will co-present a webinar entitled “Best Practices for Web Application Performance – Customers are Won or Lost in One Second” on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. EST.

'Net Features : aberdeen load times

Load Times Impact Conversion by 7 Percent