If you make your customers wait online, you'd better make it worth their while. You've only got five seconds.
Speed and performance of a web retailers' site can can make the difference between a profitable year and a year in the red. Online shoppers expect quick service with lightning-fast load times and can easily click to a different e-retailer if their chosen shop disappoints.
A third of online shoppers will click away if they have to wait more than five seconds for a page to load, according to data from Soasta, a company that measure's website performance. The portion of users who click away while waiting for a page to load is referred to as the "bounce rate." A further one-second slowdown from five to six seconds increased users' bounce rate by a full 3 percentage points.