Users Abandon Websites With Longer Load Time

(RTTNews) - Instant access and lighting download speed make websites user-friendly. Many websites are attractive in design and loaded with several features, but they are poor in load time. Application delivery and cyber security solutions provider Radware Ltd. has made an extensive study of load time of websites, and found that 78 percent of top news websites take more than 3 seconds to download.

Among the travel and hospitality sites reviewed, www.priceline.com, www.hotels.com, and www.tripadvisor.com got good scores in Time To Interact or TTI, meaning the load time needed before one can act on the page.

In the news category, www.theguardian.com, and www.huffingtonpost.com recorded 1.2 seconds and 2.5 seconds respectively in TTI.

In sports category, 47 out of 50 websites evaluated were found to be generally slow. Three sports websites showed speed of less than 3 seconds. In case of travel sites, 80 percent of them took more than three seconds to load on a desk top. This figure is significant as 75 percent of the bookings for travel sites are from desk top users.

"Three seconds doesn't sound like much, but 57 percent of users will abandon a site that takes any longer," said Kent Alstad, VP of Acceleration at Radware.

Radware provided a very interesting revelation that desktop sites have higher conversion rates than smartphones and tablets for e-commerce sites. Average e-commerce conversion rate was found to be 2.71 percent and the desktop sites had this at 2.51 percent and the smartphones claim only 0.96 percent.