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Slow Websites Kill Big Sales

Antony Edwards

It may be the dog days of summer for most, but retailers are already busy prepping to avoid an Amazon Prime type meltdown during the holiday shopping season. However, rather than focusing efforts on coping with surges in traffic to your website, you also need to be thinking about the ongoing speed of your site.

80% find a consistently slow-running website more frustrating than one that is down

A recent YouGov poll commissioned by Eggplant explored attitudes to website speed and performance and found that speed was critical to consumers in both the US and UK. In a poll of 3,200 adults in the UK and USA, eight out of 10 adults (80%) find a consistently slow-running website more frustrating than one that is down. Indeed, 73 percent stated they would be likely to try an alternative website if the one they were using was slow.

The poll identified that slow websites frustrate 60% of consumers compared to a site that is down (23%).

There were some slight variances in the results from the US and UK consumers, but the overall sentiment was the same: slow websites will not be tolerated.

While outages are a problem for businesses around the world, the survey reveals that a slow website is much more damaging than one that is temporarily down. To stay competitive and retain customers, businesses must focus on website speed alongside website availability.

US Findings

■ 79% of Americans find a slow running website more frustrating to use than one that is down or not working.

■ 41% of American consumers rate website speed as very important when it comes to online activity.

■ 69% of Americans would move to a competitor if a site was slow.

■ When it comes to American consumers, site speed is so essential that well over half (59%) feel much more negative to a brand if its site is consistently slow to load. This is in contrast to less than a quarter (23%) who feel the same way if a site was temporarily down or not working.

■ To provide context 24% of US consumers stated they would eat less than half a donut before giving up on a website and moving to another.

UK Findings

■ 81% of Brits find a slow website more frustrating to use than one that is down or not working.

■ 70% of UK adults rate website speed as important when it comes to online activity.

■ 75% of Brits would be likely to use a competitor website if the one they were using was slow. This is especially important for brands who commoditize based entirely on price such as tickets, hotel, and travel sites.

■ 60% feel much more negative to a brand if its website is consistently slow to load compared to 23% who feel the same way if a site is down or not working.

It's clear from the poll that in the eyes of consumers a fast, responsive, website is critical. It is no longer simply enough for sites to be available, to make the most of the holiday traffic surges brands need to ensure a fast experience. By focusing on speed, it will help maximize conversions and enhance a brands reputation. It appears from the data that speed has the potential to kill websites!

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Slow Websites Kill Big Sales

Antony Edwards

It may be the dog days of summer for most, but retailers are already busy prepping to avoid an Amazon Prime type meltdown during the holiday shopping season. However, rather than focusing efforts on coping with surges in traffic to your website, you also need to be thinking about the ongoing speed of your site.

80% find a consistently slow-running website more frustrating than one that is down

A recent YouGov poll commissioned by Eggplant explored attitudes to website speed and performance and found that speed was critical to consumers in both the US and UK. In a poll of 3,200 adults in the UK and USA, eight out of 10 adults (80%) find a consistently slow-running website more frustrating than one that is down. Indeed, 73 percent stated they would be likely to try an alternative website if the one they were using was slow.

The poll identified that slow websites frustrate 60% of consumers compared to a site that is down (23%).

There were some slight variances in the results from the US and UK consumers, but the overall sentiment was the same: slow websites will not be tolerated.

While outages are a problem for businesses around the world, the survey reveals that a slow website is much more damaging than one that is temporarily down. To stay competitive and retain customers, businesses must focus on website speed alongside website availability.

US Findings

■ 79% of Americans find a slow running website more frustrating to use than one that is down or not working.

■ 41% of American consumers rate website speed as very important when it comes to online activity.

■ 69% of Americans would move to a competitor if a site was slow.

■ When it comes to American consumers, site speed is so essential that well over half (59%) feel much more negative to a brand if its site is consistently slow to load. This is in contrast to less than a quarter (23%) who feel the same way if a site was temporarily down or not working.

■ To provide context 24% of US consumers stated they would eat less than half a donut before giving up on a website and moving to another.

UK Findings

■ 81% of Brits find a slow website more frustrating to use than one that is down or not working.

■ 70% of UK adults rate website speed as important when it comes to online activity.

■ 75% of Brits would be likely to use a competitor website if the one they were using was slow. This is especially important for brands who commoditize based entirely on price such as tickets, hotel, and travel sites.

■ 60% feel much more negative to a brand if its website is consistently slow to load compared to 23% who feel the same way if a site is down or not working.

It's clear from the poll that in the eyes of consumers a fast, responsive, website is critical. It is no longer simply enough for sites to be available, to make the most of the holiday traffic surges brands need to ensure a fast experience. By focusing on speed, it will help maximize conversions and enhance a brands reputation. It appears from the data that speed has the potential to kill websites!

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...