The Cost of Small Slowdowns on a Website
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Slow opening and loading speeds, even for a moment, are a situation that will frustrate customers. During purchase processes, this slowness can even cause transactions to be terminated without being completed. The user, due to the slowness, can directly turn to different alternatives. Those who investigated the effects of these scenarios determined that even delays of less than a second create disadvantages with respect to sales.
Within the scope of the research, the data of landing pages on the website of a brand offering personal hygiene products and the daily sales and site visitor data of seven globally large-volume clothing brands over a two-year period were examined. These examined data were also compared with detailed website performance data obtained from Catchpoint, a digital experience management company. This comparison determined that a 10% delay in the website loading process causes an average 2.4% loss in earnings per customer and a 4.2% loss in total sales, and that customers who experience delayed loading on the website are less likely to revisit the website on the same day the transaction took place.
At this point, it can be said that people are quite fragile during transaction processes due to the lack of experiences that can secure their attachment, and the desire to complete the payment step without waiting when they are about to lose money. When this observation was applied from desktop to mobile devices, it emerged that fragility increased even further. What made this situation most disadvantageous was that customer losses due to performance problems could not be recovered later.
The following must be said: it may sometimes not be in the hands of the site involved to prevent slowdowns on the internet. But at this point, the following responsibility also falls on seller sites: data within the site must be managed considering the user's internet performance, and certain measures must be taken to improve site opening speeds. Care should also be taken so that third-party content does not impact performance, ensuring that this third-party content does not appear on pages such as the critical payment stage, or it should be limited. One suggestion from the researchers is on the topic of 'seller sites' checkout pages being simple, with only basic-level information available for customers': 'Waiting times can be reduced with fast payment options such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.'
Source: HBR
