There are a lot of things you probably didn’t know about website usage, online purchasing and mobile. For example 51% of online shoppers in the US say that site slowness is the top reason they’d abandon a purchase.
Tammy Everts has put together an amazing list of Web performance statistics on the radware.com website that includes some intriguing observations. In her post she talks about user experience and expectations, mobile user habits, page speeds (in both the U.S. and the EU), page size and composition, performance best practices, network performance and finally browsers. She also supplies sources for most of the statistics.
It’s a truly impressive list of stats with a number of gems.
When it comes to online shopping:
44% of online shoppers say that slow online transactions make them anxious about the success of a transaction. A progress bar on a page that loads in less than 5 seconds or less will make that page feel slower than it really is. And shoppers remember online wait times as being 35% longer than they actually are. When pages are slow, business metrics suffer more now than they did a few years ago. For example, a page that took 6 seconds to load in 2010 suffered a -40% conversion hit. Today, a 6-second page takes a -50% hit.
Mobile users are also more impatient. According to Tammy’s stats 85% of mobile users expect pages to load as fast as or faster than they load on the desktop. And mobile users are more likely to go to the full site rather than use an app to shop:
35% of mobile users will choose to view the full site when given the option. Mobile users who shop the full site spend more than those who shop the m.site. We found that, for every $7.00 of mobile-generated revenue, $5.50 (79%) was generated by mobile shoppers using the full site. Only $1.00 (14%) came via m.site, and $0.50 (7%) via the mobile app. Mobile commerce accounts for an estimated 16% of total online sales. 80% of online retailers have a mobile-specific site, up from 76% in 2012.
When it comes to page speeds in the U.S.:
The median leading ecommerce site takes 5.3 seconds to become interactive (i.e. render primary content “above the fold”) and 8.56 seconds to fully load. This represents a 26% slowdown since spring 2012, when the median page took 6.8 seconds to load.
The reason is probably due to the growing size of Web pages. Tammy states that the average web page has grown 151% in just three years. At the end of December 2013, the average top 1,000 web page was 1575 KB. When the HTTP Archive began tracking this data three years ago, the average page was 651 KB. More than half of this page size is due to images. A whopping 804 KB per page is comprised of images. (Three years ago, images comprised just 372 KB of a page’s total payload.)
These are just a handful of the stats you can find in Tammy’s post. Go check out the rest of them here.
