Preparing for peak holiday shopping: Five key reasons why speed matters

For every website, speed and performance matter. No one wants to sit and wait for pages to load. For some websites, though, speed drives whether or not people use the site, make purchases through the site and ultimately keep an online business running. E-commerce is one of these areas, and with the rush of holiday shopping just around the corner, now is a great time to think about preparing your site for peak traffic to make sure you’re up, running and optimized throughout the entire shopping period.

Because performance is often business critical and directly tied to the bottom line, we thought an infographic would be the best way to illustrate five key reasons why and how speed matters.

• Users will visit a website less if its loading time is slower than its competitors by 250 milliseconds, or one-quarter of a second: less time than a blink of an eye
• Increased server load is the main reason why a website is slow
• A one-second delay in page response = 11% fewer page view, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7% reduction in online sales
• Online shoppers expect web pages to load in 2 seconds and abandon a site after 3 seconds
• Poor performance leads to revenue loss; for example, if your site generates USD 85,000 in sales per day, you lose USD 2 million a year. 

Make sure that the the shopper shops til he drops; don't make the shopper drop you because your site crashes! Get ready now for the hordes of holiday shoppers!

Learn more about preparing for peak and avoiding the pitfalls of poor performance in our white paper. 

Photo (c) 2008 Jennifer C. used under Creative Commons license.