UK and German retail websites quickest to load according to Dynatrance
Ask anyone to name their biggest bugbear when shopping online and we bet their answer will be ‘slow websites.’ It’s true that many elements contribute to a positive online experience, yet sluggish loading times are the one thing that will cause a consumer to press the ‘X’ button faster than you can say “page error.”
At River Island, we know that an optimised, fast-loading website plays a huge part in providing our shoppers with the best possible experience. That’s why it’s great to see that retailers in the UK, along with our German counterparts, are leading the way when it comes to speedy websites.
Dynatrace study
A Dynatrance study, published last week, analysed user experience by measuring the time it took for main retail sites in the UK, US, Germany, France, Australia, China, Spain and the Nordic region to be ready for shoppers to use. On average, global retail sites between Black Friday and 3rd January 2018 were ‘visually complete’ and ready to use within 2.5 seconds.
Shoppers in Germany and the UK were able to access and browse sites the fastest; both were quicker than the average time of 2.5 seconds, being visually complete in 1.59 and 1.69 seconds, respectively. Meanwhile, Australia and China featured bottom of the list, at 2.88 and 3.54 seconds, respectively. Interestingly, US-based websites were found to be 42% slower than Germany and 39% slower than the UK.
Dynatrance applied its visually complete metric to garner the data, which measures the time it takes for a web page to appear fully loaded and ready to browse from the view of the shopper. This is in comparison to the more popular response time metric, which calculates the total time for all features on a website to load.
“Consumers expect websites to load within three seconds or less, so these results make for good reading for retailers,” recognised Dave Anderson, digital performance expert at Dynatrance. He went on to explain that the smallest of delay in user experience “can have a ripple effect on sales,” citing US retailer Nordstrom as an example, which reported a sizeable 11% drop in sales due to a mere half-second delay.
“Providing shoppers with a great online shopping experience is vital for retailers looking to succeed in the cut-throat world of ecommerce,” concluded Anderson, and we couldn’t agree more. We’re growing our Engineering and Test team and are looking for candidates with experience and skills in the fields of UI/UX, devops, the cloud and more. If you’re interested, take a look at our current vacancies here.
Source:
https://www.dynatrace.com/company/newsroom/press-release/speedy-websites-bring-holiday-cheer-to-shoppers-with-global-retail-websites-ready-to-use-in-3-seconds-or-less/