E-commerce Websites Lose Sales Due to Performance or Stability Problems, Load Impact’s Annual Report Reveals

O’REILLY VELOCITY CONFERENCE, SANTA CLARA, CA – E-commerce sites are some of the worst performing as a category even though availability and performance directly impact their bottom line, according the annual State of Web Readiness report released today by Load Impact, the  cloud-based, on-demand load testing tool.

The surprising finding that e-commerce sites perform well below expectations and often with profound performance issues, are the result of data collected from over 5,000 performance tests and surveys of more than 500 Load Impact users in 190 countries.

“E-commerce sites spend substantially more on performance testing than other categories, yet 68 percent of our survey respondents said they’ve experienced website performance or stability problems in the last 12 months,” said Ragnar Lönn, Load Impact founder and CEO.  “That’s amazing, because we know from other public research that there’s a direct correlation between increased latency and decreased customer satisfaction.”

Data from the Load Impact research found that the average time it took to load a page on an e-commerce site was almost 8 seconds while other sites had average page load times between 4 seconds and 5.5 seconds.

“A second here or there doesn’t sound very important, but according to our survey respondents, those few seconds can mean the loss of money and visitors,” said Lönn. 

Forty percent of e-commerce respondents to the Load Impact study reported losing money in the last year due to performance issues, compared to only 25 percent of sites in other categories.

Other highlights from the report include:

• Sixty percent of companies overestimate their site’s capacity to handle user traffic.
• Ninety-eight percent of e-tailers thought sub 2-second response time was desirable.
• Low latency, while important for all websites is crucial for e-retailers.
• Very few respondents load test the mobile versions of their sites.

Load Impact’s 2013 State of Web Readiness: E-Commerce is now available for download at http://www.loadimpact.com. 

Media contacts:

Greg Spector
greg@loadimpact.com
1 415 717 4666

About Load Impact

Load Impact is a cloud-based, on-demand load testing tool, with more than 800,00 load tests executed since the service was launched in 2009.  Load Impact has earned the trust of over 50,000 users who continuously use the service to ensure the quality of their online presence.  This allows each organization to allocate the appropriate amount of infrastructure resources, and to spot potential performance problems before they become an issue, providing an accurate, scalable and proactively optimized service for the end users.  Load test your site at http://www.loadimpact.com. 

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