QuBit is a London-based company started by four former Googlers. It looks at big data to help businesses make better decisions. Their recent research (done over two weeks in April 2012) shows that slow speeds cost online retailers globally more than £1.7 billion in lost sales. E-commerce websites are commonplace these days, and retailers are skillful at knowing what customers would like to see on a page. But not many are tuned to the fact that people quickly run out of patience when waiting to view websites that take a long time to load.
Moreover, Google suggests that any site taking longer than 1.5 seconds to load these days is “slow” and will consequently be relegated within their search engine ranking. This is something your business does not want to happen!
In the first few months of this year, Alexa.com ranked several retail sites globally: IKEA, Bestbuy, and H&M are doing well, but Barnes and Noble and Deal Extreme are really making people wait according to this data.
Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit is surprised that major businesses are not paying attention to latency and the bounce rates that could happen as a result. He said,
“Site speed is one of the most fundamental measures of a site’s performance. There are a range of simple things that retailer can do to enhance site speed – from using a Content Delivery Network to implementing tag management – and the £1.7 billion cost of slow speeds should be more than enough incentive for retailers. Based on current predictions, if retailers fail to act on poor site speeds it could be costing them more than £4 billion in just 18 months.”
