If you've ever opened a website and had to wait an inordinate amount of time for it to load, I don't have to tell you that it can become an annoyance. Not only do people disassociate from the brand, but they become frustrated and would rather try to find the content they want from a faster, more reliable source.
As mentioned before, we have mere seconds to engage the viewer.
Take this excerpt from a study done by KISSmetrics from the article, How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line, by Sean Work, as an indicator. For further information, please visit https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

The preceding screenshots gives us some interesting facts:
73 percent of mobile Internet users say that they've encountered a website that was too slow upon loading
51 percent of mobile Internet users say that they've encountered a website that crashed, froze, or returned an error
38 percent of mobile Internet users say that they've encountered a website that wasn't available
47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or fewer
40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7-percent reduction in conversions
If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost the company $2.5 million in lost sales every year
Improving a website could have a greater impact on your business than you may realize. This is a quote from an article at http://www.getelastic.com/:
"Walmart used a mix of pre-design, hands-on usability testing including paper-prototypes with post-design user tests (using moderated sessions throughout Canada) and on-site A/B testing, including an initial test of running both the responsive and non-responsive sites concurrently for about a week. Results were very positive for the responsive design. Conversion's up 20%, mobile orders up 98%." | ||
--- Linda Bustos (http://www.getelastic.com/how-walmart-cas-responsive-redesign-boost-conversion-by-20/) |
Let's take a look at this simple but informative image detailing the effects that load times have on consumers. It's clear that slow load times have a tremendously negative effect on consumers who shop online:
