Some of the UK’s leading etailers are risking sales losses after failing to improve their load speeds over the past 12 months, according to a new index report by Visualsoft.
The research, which was carried out to analyse improvements made by the country’s top 250 etailers over the past year, found that 62 per cent are rated as ‘poor.’ This means the majority of the sites tested take longer than nine seconds to load on 3G, which is in comparison to 54 per cent of sites that rated poor in 2017. Meanwhile, a further 16 per cent of retailers’ sites took 15 seconds or longer to load – a figure that has worsened by 4 per cent when compared to the same time last year. Google estimates that these e-retailers will be losing a minimum of 32 per cent of all potential visitors through load time alone.
Just 1 per cent of the retailers tested were marked ‘excellent’ – taking under four seconds to load and expected to experience low levels of potential visitor loss. This is also a worse performance than 2017, when 2 per cent of retailers rated as excellent.
The figures run contrary to the growing importance of mobile in driving seasonal revenues. Statistics show that Black Friday weekend was the biggest ever for traffic and sales made via mobile, and the trend is only set to continue in the lead-up to Christmas.
Dean Benson, Visualsoft’s CEO, comments: “Page load speed is one of the biggest contributors to customer frustration, basket abandonment and lost sales, with almost 47 per cent of customers expecting a site to load in less than two seconds. However, many companies are still unwittingly sacrificing load speeds as they grow their online stores.
“The rapid growth of e-commerce may lure some brands into a false sense of security, but nobody is immune to the troubles of the retail sector. Optimising website performance is of business-critical importance.
“However, these figures underline a general picture of complacency within the biggest names in the sector. This provides a huge opportunity for smaller, hungrier businesses in the market to challenge the big brands – many of whom are clearly unable (or unwilling) to focus on getting the basics right – and are losing out on sales as a result.”