Do you have a website that your customers like to see with great
content about your products tailored just for them? That's great,
but may not mean much for your business if uptime,
availability and performance is poor. It's critical to have the
infrastructure in place to deliver that valued content with the
speed expected by the customers who are accessing it from home
computers with slower broadband connections, mobile devices on the
road or from high-speed broadband connections at work.
So how much time do you have before that happens? You may want
to sit down.
Two seconds. That's what 47% of 1,048 online U.S.
consumers responded in a 2009 study, "eCommerce Web Site
Performance Today," by Forrester Research Inc. Two seconds to make
or lose a sale on your website. The study also found that 40%
of the consumers surveyed said they'd wait only three seconds
before completely abandoning a website page and shopping somewhere
else online.
So 2-3 seconds is the benchmark to study your eCommerce website
and determe if it is indeed fast enough. That's for your
website displaying on a desktop browser. With increasing broadband
speeds and more powerful mobile devices, consumers expectations are
going to be higher.
Collect all the information you can about your website page
speed and performance including your hosting provider, your
Internet ISP and your IT systems. For larger companies or
high-volume eCommerce sites , it make sense to use Web Performance
Monitoring products that have real-time status reports about how
well your website is delivering content to your customers.
For smaller companies, you can add Google Analytics Event APIs on
your site as well as use a new Page Speed tool that works with the
Firebug plugin on Firefox.