Websites have four seconds to make an impression on shoppers

Howard Lake | 26 November 2006 | Blogs

Research by Akamai shows that customers are likely to wait no more than four seconds for a website to load before losing patience and leaving for another website. While shopping and donating online are not of course the same activity, the research underlines the importance for donation pages on charity websites to load as rapidly as possible.
Akamai’s research amongst those who shop online regularly found that 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load. The research looked at shoppers’ attitudes to websites and their functions. The most popular reason for not shopping at a particular site was high prices and shipping costs. Page load times was the second most cited cause.
The research, carried out by Jupiter Research for Akamai in the first six months of 2006, found that page-loading time was ranked the most important problem by nearly half of the more mature online shoppers – those who have been purchasing online for over two yars or who spend more than $1,500 (£788) a year online.
According to Akamai, the level of patience has halved compared to just a few years ago, as shoppers’ expectations have increased.
Despite this, Akamai said that almost half of the websites in the top 500 US shopping sites took longer than four seconds to load.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.