That’s the title of an article in The Retail Bulletin. According to a survey done by Sitemorse, the slowest sites were Waterestone’s, Foyles and British Bookshops & Stationers. They can top in the list of slowest sites. Sitemorse uses a test that automatically tests the first 125 pages of a website based on several performace criteria.
Waterstones was the worst of the lot with an average response time of 69.8 seconds. It seems as if the book sellers don’t realize that consumers will go elsewhere (maybe to Amazon?) rather than put up with poor performance.
… This poor level of performance surprises Lawrence Shaw, chief executive of Sitemorse, who says: “There continues to be a focus on increasing conversion rates and retailers keep adding new things to their websites like analytics but if customers are hitting poor performing pages then they will not hand around.”
The potential for losing customers is huge when you consider just how long even a four second wait is for a page to download, according to Shaw, who believes maximising the online experience for customers realistically requires response times to be less than 0.75 seconds. Of the total 500 sites tested only 206 achieved this benchmark – this is over 90 times fastest than Waterstone’s.
Not a big surprise. Sometimes they don’t even load at all.