Dive Brief:

• Retail websites have slowed down by 21% and are heavier by 41% compared to last year, a problem for brand perception and customer retention, according to a study by business IT company Radware, “State of the Union: Ecommerce Page Speed & Web Performance, Winter 2014.”

• The median time it took to interact with a page was five seconds, which fails to meet expectations. Many people abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.

• Customers are less likely to return to a slow site than a site with an outage.

Dive Insight:

Radware did its homework here, testing page loads with real browsers on a DSL connection. As retailers boost their sites to adapt a content- and image-heavy, Pinterest-inspired look, they must keep in mind customers' impatience. While 10 seconds is the outside amount of time people will wait for a page to load, five seconds fails to meet typical expectations, and that is even far too long for many web users. It will be beneficial for retailers to realize that many people check out after three seconds and, unless they think it’s an anomaly, may not come back.